LITERARY FRIENDS 



AND 



ACQUAINTANCE 

A PERSONAL RETROSPECT OF 
AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP 

By W. D. HOWELLS 

ILLUSTRATED 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

1900 



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L.iorarv of Conv4r-=*>->s) 



Two Copies Rec: M 
NOV 171900 I 

FIRST COPY. } 

2nd Copy Dtiivwfld tf 
ORDER DIV1SIV.N 1 

NOV 20 i9 0Q I 



FIRST COPY 
de'tvered te 

DEC 29 1900 
0:nA;! uiviSijN 






Copyright, 1900, by Harper & Brothers. 

yiii rights reser-ved. 



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IlKNUY WADSWOUTII LONGKEI.LO"' 



y T E 

It seems to me that if one is to write sndb a, book 
as this at all, one cannot profitably do so without a 
frankness concerning one's self as \rell as others which 
might be misnnderstood- Bnt I wish to make of my 
own personality merely a background which divers im- 
portant figures are projected against, and I am willing 
to sacrifice myself a little in giving them relief. I 
will try to show them as they seemed to me, and I shall 
not blame any one who says that they are not trnly 
represented : I shall only claim that I have truly repre- 
sented their appearance, and I shall not claim that I 
could fuHv conceive of them in their realitv. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

part 3flr6t 

My First Visit to New England 1 



part Second 

First Impressions op Literary New York 67 

part ^birD 
Roundabout to Boston 91 

part jFourtb 
Literary Boston as I Knew It . . 113 

part 3fiftb 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 146 

part Sijtb 
The White Mr. Longfellow 178 

part Scvcntb 
Studies op Lowell 212 

part JBiQbtb 

Cambridge Neighbors . 251 

V 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



HENRY WADSNYOllTU LONGFELLOW Frontispiece. 

BAYAUp TAYLOR IN ARAB COSTUME Facing p. 2 

MR. IIOWELLS AND BAYARD TAYLOR, 18«0 " 4 

THE HOUSE IN WHICH LONGFELLOW WAS BORN. . . " S 

THE LONGFELLOW MANSION AT PORTLAND .... " 12 

PORTLAND HARBOR, FROM ML'NJOY HILL " 14 

HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLKS " 18 

RETURN WARRANT OP SHERIFF GEORGE COR WIN FOR 

HANGING BRIDGET BISHOP " 20 

A TYPICAL STREET IN OLD SALEM " 22 

"GIRLS IN EVANGELINE HATS AND KIRTLES TOSSING 

HAY" " 26 

GROVES OP ACADEMY, HARVARD " 28 

GALLOWS HILL, SALEM " 30 

"THE PUBLISHER SEEMED AWARE OP THE POETIC 

QUALITY OP THE TRANSACTION" " 32 

THE OLD CORNER BOOK-STORE " 30 

JAMES T. FIELDS (About 1S70) " 42 

DINING-ROOM IN JAMES T. FIELDS's HOUSE .... " 44 
THE CHARLES RIVER, PROM THE DRAWING-ROOM WIN- 
DOW OF THE FIELDS HOUSE " 4(i '^^ 

THE GRANARY BURYING-GROUND, BOSTON " 50 

A NEW ENGLAND LANDSCAPE " 52 

LARCH WALK, WAYSIDE " 54 

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE " 5(» 

HENRY DAVID TIIOREAU " 58 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON " 00 

EMEKSON's house at CONCORD " 02 

HAWTHORNE'S COTTAGE, WAYSIDE " 04 

CHARLES P. BROWNE (*' ARTEMUS WARD") .... " 68 

vii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN Facing p. 70 

THE MEETING WITH WHITMAN " 74 

WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER " 76 

JOHN J. PIATT . . \ ..09 

MRS. JOHN J. PIATT ) * ' * 

MRS. R. H. STODDARD " 84 

R. H. STODDARD " 86 

CASA FALIER, IN VENICE, WHERE MR. HOWELLS LIVED " 90 

CHARLES HALE } «« GO 
THEODORE WINTHROP f 

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY " 94 

RICHARD HILDRETH " 96 

BRATTLE STREET, CAMBRIDGE ... " 100 

"it's LINCOLN'S HAND" " 106 

SYRINGA THICKET, LOWELL'S GARDEN " 108 

ENGLISH ELMS AT LOWELL'S GATE " 112 

JULIA WARD HOWE " 114 

HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD " 116 

PARK STREET CiIURCH. BOSTON " 118 

LOOKING OUT OP BOYLSTON PLACE ** 120 

JAMES R. OSGOOD " 122 

CELIA THAXTER " 124 

E. P. WHIPPLE " . 126 

GEORGE TICKNOR " 128 

THE TICKNOR MANSION, BOSTON " 130 

WHITE ISLAND LIGHT. ISLES OF SHOALS, THE EARLY 

HOME OF CELIA THAXTER " 132 

THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH " 134 

LUCY LARCOM • • • " ^^^ 

J. T. TROWBRIDGE " 140 

THE OLD ( EMETERY NEXT THE PARK STREET CHURCH " 142 

SAMUEL BOWLES '* 144 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES IN I860 *' 164 

THE WATER-SIDE AT BEVERLY " 172 

LONGFELLOW'S HOUSE, BRATTLE STREET, CAMBRIDGE . " 192 

THE WASHINGTON ELM, CAMBRIDGE " 208 

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT FORTY " 212 

"the ELMY QUIET OF THE CAMBRIDGE STREETS" . " 220 

LOWELL'S WILLOWS " 226 

"A PLEASANT OLD-FASHIONED HOUSE NEAR THE DEL- 
TA" " 233 

viii 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



ARLINGTON SPY POND Facing p. 

FKANCIS J. CHILD . . . 

PROFESSOR child's HOUSE , 

W. D. HOWELLS'S HOME . 

HJALMAR HJORTH BOYESEN 

RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR. 

HOME OF RICHARD HENRY DANA, JR. 

HENRY JAMES, THE ELDER ) 

JOHN HOLMES ) ' ' ' 

JOHN G. PALFREY 

QUINCY STREET, CAMBRIDGE . . . 



238 

258 
262 
266 

270 

274 

278 

282 
286 



LITERARY 
I^RIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 



part jffrst 
MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 



IE there was any one in the world who had his being 
more wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I 
am sure I should not have known where to find him, and 
I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres 
of literary activity than I then was, or among those 
more purely devoted to literature than myself. I had 
been for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book 
notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an in- 
land city, and I do not know that my life differed out- 
wardly from that of any other young journalist, who 
had begun as I had in a country printing-office, and 
might be supposed to be looking forward to advance- 
ment in his profession or in public affairs. But in- 
wardly it was altogether different with me. Inwardly 
I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, 
unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far 
forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend 
J. J. Piatt, the half-author of a little volume of very 

A 1 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

unkno^\^ verse, and Mr. Lowell had lately accepted and 
had begun to print in the Atla)4ic Monthly five or six 
poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and 
sketches, and criticisms for the Saturday Press of N'ew 
York, a long-forgotten but once very lively expression 
of literary intention in an extinct bohemia of that city ; 
and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and 
criticisms in our ovra paper. These, as avcII as my feats 
in the reno^vned periodicals of the East, met with kind- 
ness, if not honor, in my own city which ought to have 
given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet. 
But it only intensified my literary ambition, already 
so strong that my veins might well have run ink rather 
than blood, and gave me a higher opinion of my 
fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were 
indeed very charming people, and such of them as 
I mostly saw were readers and lovers of books. So- 
ciety in Columbus at that day had a pleasant refine- 
ment which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond 
retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have 
had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixed ideals, 
which were none the less graceful and becoming be- 
cause they were the simple old American ideals, now 
vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of 
good and evil as they have it in Europe, and as it has 
imparted itself to American travel and sojourn. There 
was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio, 
as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Ken- 
tucky, Pennsylvania, 'New York, and N'ew England 
all joined to characterize the manners and customs. 
I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone ; 
the intellectual taste among the elders was the South- 
ern taste for the classic and the standard in literature ; 
but we who were younger preferred the modern au- 
thors : we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Haw- 




BAYAKD TAYLOR IN ARAB COSTUME 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

thorne, and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Ten- 
nyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and Longfellow; 
and I, I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there 
was not some new thing from the others. 'Now and 
then an immediate French book penetrated to us: we 
read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to 
England and the East largely for onr literary opin- 
ions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if 
we could not quite receive it as gospel. One of us 
took the CornhUl Magazine, because Thackeray was 
the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers 
among us; and a visiting young lady from N^ew Eng- 
land, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one 
of our houses, ^^ AVhy, have you got the Atlantic Month- 
ly out heref could be answered, with cold superiority, 
" There are several contributors to the Atlantic in 
Columbus." There were in fact tw^o: my roommate, 
who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and 
Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully sev- 
eral as twenty are. 

II 

That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then 
a literary light from the East swam into our skies. I 
lieard and saw Emerson, and I once met Bayard Tay- 
lor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a 
guest after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got 
through the evening. I do not think I opened my 
mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I 
could do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly 
smoked, and chatted with our host, and quaffed the 
beer which we had very good in the West. All the 
while I did him homage as the first author by calling 
whom I had met. I longed to tell him how much I 
liked his poems, which we used to get by heart in those 

3 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have 
him know that — 

" AuQh. ich war in Arkadien geboren," 

that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and 
the Saturday Press, and was the potential author of 
things destined to eclipse all literature hitherto at- 
tempted. But I could not tell him ; and there was no 
one else who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as 
well so; I might have perished of his recognition, for 
my modesty was equal to my merit. 

In fact I think we were all rather modest young 
fellows, we who formed the group wont to spend some 
part of every evening at that house, where there was 
always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We 
had our opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps 
because we had mostly accepted them from England 
or N^ew England, as I have said) we were not vain 
of them; and we would by no means have urged them 
before a living literary man like that. I believe none 
of us ventured to speak, except the poet, my roommate, 
who said, He believed so and so was the original of so 
and so ; and was promptly told. He had no right to say 
such a thing. Naturally, we came away rather criti- 
cal of our host's guest, whom I afterwards knew as the 
kindliest heart in the world. But we had not shone 
in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to 
think that he had not shone in ours. 



Ill 

At that time he was filling a large space in the 
thoughts of the young people Avho had any thoughts 
about literature. He had come to his full repute as 
an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still 

4 



%' I 




ME. HOWF>T,T,S AISTD BAYARD TAYLOR, 1860 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

wore the halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign 
lands when they were yet really foreign. He had not 
written his novels of American life, once so welcomed, 
and now so forgotten; it was very long before he 
had achieved that incomparable translation of Faust 
which must always remain the finest and best, and 
which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if he 
had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But 
what then most commended him to the regard of us 
star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly toward our seven- 
ties) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines 
from time to time : in the first Putnam's (where there 
was a dashing picture of him in an Arab burnoose 
and a turban), and in Harper s^ and in the Atlantic. 
It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still 
think so ; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the 
inevitable allegiance to the manner of the great mas- 
ters of the day. It was graced for us by the pathetic 
romance of his early love, which some of its sweetest 
and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he 
married almost in her death hour ; and we who were 
hoping to have our hearts broken, or already had them 
so, would have been glad of something more of the ob- 
vious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refresh- 
ing himself after his hour on the platform. 

He remained for nearly a year the only author I 
had seen, and I met him once again before I saw any 
other. Our second meeting was far from Columbus, 
as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to 
New England by way of Niagara and the Canadian 
rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto, and realized 
myself abroad without any signal adventures; but 
at Montreal something very pretty happened to me. I 
came into the hotel office, the evening of a first day's 
lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the register 

5 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from 
it two smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and 
I heard one of them say, to my great amaze and hap- 
piness, " Hello, here's Howells !" 

^' Oh," I broke out upon him, " I was just looking 
for some one I knew. I hope you are some one who 
knows meT' 

" Only through your contributions to the Saturday 
Press/' said the young fellow, and with these golden 
words, the precious first personal recognition of my 
authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and 
the rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he intro- 
duced himself and his friend. I do not know what be- 
came of this friend, or where or how he eliminated 
himself ; but we two others were inseparable from that 
moment. He was a young lawyer from New York, 
and when I came back from Italy, four or five years 
later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a 
never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In 
whatever world he happens now to be, I should like to 
send him my greetings, and confess to him that my 
art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, 
and nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as 
that outcry of his over the hotel register in Montreal. 
We were comrades for four or five rich days, and 
shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the 
monuments of those ancient Canadian capitals, which 
I think we valued at all their picturesque worth. We 
made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and 
made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of 
love with all the pretty faces and dresses we saw; and 
we talked evermore about literature and literary peo- 
ple. He had more acquaintance with the one, and 
more passion for the other, but he could tell me of 
Pfaff's lager-beer cellar on Broadway, where the 

6 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

Saturday Press fellows and the other bohemians met; 
and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit 
it as soon as I reached New York, in spite of the to- 
bacco and beer (which I was given to understand were 
de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had known 
them, were apt to make me sick. 

I was very desolate after I parted from this good 
fellow, who returned to Montreal on his way to New 
York, while I remained in Quebec to continue later on 
mine to New England. When I came in from seeing 
him oif in a calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard 
Taylor in the reading-room, where he sat sunken in 
what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not 
know me, or even notice me, though I made several 
errands in and out of the reading-room in the vain 
hope that he might do so : doubly vain, for I am aware 
now that I was still flovni with the pride of that pretty 
experience in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition 
of something like it. At last, as no chance volunteered 
to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him and 
name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure 

of meeting him at Doctor 's in Columbus. The 

poet gave no sign of consciousness at the sound of a 
name which I had fondly begun to think might not be 
so all unknown. He looked up with an unkindling 
eye, and asked. Ah, how was the Doctor ? and when I . 
had reported favorably of the Doctor, our conversa- : 
tion ended. 

He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must 
have classed me with that multitude all over the coun- 
try who had shared the pleasure I professed in meet- 
ing him before ; it was surely my fault that I did not 
speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I 
spoke it at all ; but the courage I had mustered did not 
quite suffice for that. In after years he assured me^, 

T 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an 
incident which I can only recall now as the untoward 
beginning of a cordial friendship. It was often my 
privilege, in those days, as reviewer and editor, to tes- 
tify my sense of the beautiful things he did in so many 
kinds "oi literature, but I never liked any of them bet- 
ter than I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to 
his art, and he was always going to do the greatest 
things in it, with an expectation of effect that never 
failed him. The things he actually did were none of 
them mean, or wanting in quality, and some of them 
are of a lasting charm that any one may feel who will 
turn to his poems; but no doubt many of theip. fell 
short of his hopes of them with the reader. It was 
fine to meet him when he was full of a new scheme; 
he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and tried to 
make you see it of the same colors and proportions it 
wore to his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the 
perfect thing he dreamed it, and he was not discour- 
aged by any disappointment he suffered with the critic 
or the public. 

He was a tireless worker, and at last his health 
failed under his labors at the newspaper desk, beneath 
the midnight gas, when he should long have rested 
from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them 
through one of those business fortuities which deform 
and embitter all our lives; but he was not the man to 
spare himself in any case. He was always attempting 
new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make 
his scholarship reparation for the want of earlier op- 
portunity and training. I remember that I met him 
once in a Cambridge street with a book in his hand 
which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, 
and he said he was just beginnnig to read the language 
at fifty: a patriarchal age to me of the early thirties! 

8 




TUE HOUSE IN WHICH LONGFELLOW WAS BOIIN 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking 
it np so late in the day, for he said, with charming 
seriousness, '^ Oh, but you know, I expect to use it in 
the other world.'' Yes, that made it worth while, I 
consented ; but was he sure of the other world ? "As 
sure as I am of this," he said ; and I have always kept 
the impression of the young faith which spoke in his 
voice and was more than his words. 

I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous 
adieux which were paid him in New York before he 
sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of the most 
graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of 
all our Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in hon- 
oring literature by his appointments, to give that place 
to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more fit for it, and 
it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished 
to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and 
the service he had done German letters. He was as 
happy in it, apparently, as a man could be in anything 
here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many 
cups of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though 
I believe these farewells, at a time when he was al- 
ready fagged with work and excitement, were notably 
harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some 
of us who were near of friendship went down to see 
him off when he sailed, as the dismal and futile wont 
of friends is ; and I recall the kind, great fellow stand- 
ing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the 
tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling 
fondly, smiling wearily, upon all. There was cham- 
pagne, of course, and an odious hilarity, without mean- 
ing and without remission, till the warning bell chased 
us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left 
of his life. 

9 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 



IV 

I have followed him far from the moment of our 
first meeting; bnt even on my way to venerate those 
N'ew England luminaries, which chiefly drew my eyes, 
I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Cur- 
tis was not, was chief of the New York group of au- 
thors in that day. I distinguished between the New- 
Englanders and the New-Y'orkers, and I suppose there 
is no question but our literary centre was then in Bos- 
ton, wherever it is, or is not, at present. But I thought 
Taylor then, and I think him noAV, one of the first in 
our whole American province of the republic of letters, 
in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing 
state, whetlier we regard quantity or quality in the 
names that gave it lustre. Lowell was then in 
perfect command of those varied forces which will 
long, if not lastingly, keep him in memory as first 
among our literary men, and master in more kinds 
than any other American. Longfellow was in the ful- 
ness of his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the 
beautiful genius which was not to know decay while 
life endured. Emerson had emerged from the popu- 
lar darkness which had so long held him a hopeless 
mystic, and was shining a lambent star of poesy and 
prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite 
artist, the unrivalled dreamer, Avhom we still always 
liken this one and that one to, whenever this one or 
that one promises greatly to please us, and still leave 
without a rival, without a companion, had lately re- 
turned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given 
us the last of the incomparable romances which the 
world was to have perfect from his hand. Doctor 
Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who 

10 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

most admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry 
by the invention of a new attitude if not a new sort 
in literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken 
was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's 
splendid lyrical gift ; and that heart of fire, doubly 
snow-bound by Quaker tradition and Puritan environ- 
ment, was penetrating every generous breast with its 
flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble pur- 
pose. Mrs. Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the 
author of the most renowned novel ever Avritten, was 
proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she 
was still writing. 

This great New England group might be enlarged 
perhaps without loss of quality by the inclusion of 
Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time, and 
whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly 
futile civilization would find more intelligent accept- 
ance now^ than it did then, when all resentment of its 
defects was specialized in enmity to Southern slavery. 
Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, 
by virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most 
fantastic, the sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which 
had begun to find expression in the Atlantic Monthly; 
and there a wonderful young girl had written a series 
of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth every- 
where with amaze and joy, so that I thought it would 
be no less an event to meet Harriet Prescott than to meet 
any of those I have named. 

I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imag- 
ined them all easily accessible in the office of the At- 
lantic Monthly, which had lately adventured in the 
fine air of high literature where so many other peri- 
odicals had gasped and died before it. The best of 
these, hitherto, and better even than the Atlantic for 
some reasons, the lamented Putnam's Magazine^, had 

11 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

perished of inanition at N^ew York, and the claim of 
the commercial capital to the literary primacy had 
passed with that brilliant venture. New York had 
nothing distinctive to show for American literature 
but the decrepit and doting Kniclcerbocker Magazine, 
Harper s New Monthly, though Curtis had already 
come to it from the wreck of Putnam's, and it had long 
ceased to be eclectic in material, and had begun to 
stand for native Avork in the allied arts which it has 
since so magnificently advanced, was not distinctively 
literary, and the Weekly had just begun to make itself 
known. The Century, Scrihners, the Cosmopolitan, 
McClure's, and I know not what others, were still un- 
imagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the 
Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them 
should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation, 
which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our 
young literature, had still six years of dreamless po- 
tentiality before it; and the Nation was always more 
Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it 
was by nativity. 

Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the 
literary field. Graham's Magazine at one time show- 
ed a certain critical force, but it seemed to perish of 
tliis expression of vitality ; and there remained Godey's 
Lady's Boole and Peterson's Magazine, publications 
really incredible in their insipidity. In the South 
there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal, with the 
moral principles all standing on their heads in defence 
of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and 
foolish notion that Western talent was repressed by 
Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston 
alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among 
such authors as I have named. Every young writer 
was ambitious to join his name with theirs in the 

12 




THE LONGFELLOW MANSION AT POllTLAND 



MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

"Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor & 
Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such 
as the business world has known nowhere else before 
or since. Their imprint was a w^arrant of quality to 
the reader and of immortality to the author, so that 
if I could have had a book issued by them at that 
day I should now be in the full enjoyment of an un- 
dying fame. 

V 
Such was the literary situation as the passionate 
pilgrim from the West approached his holy land at 
Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Kailway from 
Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleep- 
ing-car, and I suppose I waked and watched during the 
whole of that long, rough journey; but I should hardly 
have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I 
was too eager to see what New England was like, and 
too anxious not to lose the least glimpse of it, to close 
my eyes after I crossed the border at Island Pond. 
I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was 
very like the Western Eeserve in northern Ohio, which 
is, indeed, a portion of New England transferred with 
all its characteristic features, and flattened out along 
the lake shore. It was not till I began to run south- 
ward into the older regions of the country that it lost 
this look, and became gratefully strange to me. It 
never had the effect of hoary antiquity which I had ex- 
pected of a country settled more than two centuries; 
with its wood-built'farms and villages it looked newer 
than the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had 
prefigured the New England landscape bare of forests, 
relieved here and there with the trees of orchards or 
plantations ; but I found apparently as much woodland 

as at home. 

13 



LITEKAKY FKlENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a 
sort of disappointment. Tides and salt Avater I had 
already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer on the 
alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the 
sea I w^as still to try upon my vision. When I stood 
on the Promenade at Portland with the kind young 
Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to, 
and wdio led me there for a most impressive first view 
of the ocean, I could not make more of it than there 
was of Lake Erie ; and I have never thought the color 
of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. 
I did not hint my disappointment to my friend ; 
I had too much regard for the feelings of an Eastern 
man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt besides 
that it would be vulgar and provincial to make com- 
parisons. I am glad now that I held my tongue, for 
that kind soul is no longer in this world, and I should 
not like to think he knew how far short of my expec- 
tations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went 
up with him into a tower or belvedere there was at 
hand; and when he pointed to the eastern horizon and 
said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and 
Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and 
began to sound myself for the emotions which I ought 
to have felt at such a sight. But in my heart I was 
empty, and heaven knows whether I saw the steamer 
which the ancient mariner in charge of that tower in- 
vited me to look at through his telescope. I never 
could see anything but a vitreous glare through a tele- 
scope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about 
through space, and failing to bring down anything 
of less than planetary magnitude. 

But there was something at Portland vastly more 
to me than seas or continents, and that was the house 
where Longfellow was born. I believe, now, I did not 

14 



ni 






MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

get the right house, but only the house he went to live 
in later ; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rap- 
ture that could not have been more genuine if it had 
been the real birthplace of the poet. I got my friend 
to show me 

" — the breezy dome of groves, 
The shadows of Deering's woods," 

because they were in one of Longfellow's loveliest and 
tenderest poems; and I made an errand to the docks, 
for the sake of the 

" — black wharves and the slips. 

And the sea-tides tossing free, 
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips, 
And the beauty and mystery of the ships, 

And the magic of the sea," 

mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes 
of the fond vision of the poet's past. I am in doubt 
whether it was at this time or a later time that I went 
to revere 

" — the dead captains as they lay 
In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay, 
Where they in battle died," 

but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under 

" — the trees which shadow each well-known street, 
As they balance up and down," 

for when I was next in Portland the great fire had 
swept the city avenues bare of most of those beautiful 
elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I w^ell remem- 
ber. 

The fact is that in those days I was bursting with 
the most romantic expectations of life in every way, 
and I looked at the whole world as material that might 
be turned into literature, or that might be associated 

15 



LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to 
keep these preposterous hopes within me, hut perhaps 
the trick of satirizing them, which I had early learnt, 
helped me to do it. I was at that particular moment 
resolved ahove all things to see things as Heinrich 
Heine saw them, or at least to report them as he did, 
no matter how I saw them ; and I w^ent ahout framing 
phrases to this end, and trying to match the ohjects of 
interest to them whenever there was the least chance 
of getting them together. 

VI 

I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or 
whether it was before or after I had passed a day or 
two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from Port- 
land, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and ex- 
plored the quaint old town (quainter then than now, 
but still quaint enough) for the memorials of Haw- 
thorne and of the witches which united to form the 
Salem I cared for. I w^ent and looked up the House 
of Seven Gables, and suffered an unreasonable disap- 
pointment that it had not a great many more of them ; 
but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget 
Bishop, with the sheriff's return of execution upon it, 
which I found at the Court-house; if anything, the 
pathos of that w^itness of one of the crudest delusions 
in the world was rather in excess of my needs ; I could 
have got on with less. I saw the pins which the 
witches were sworn to have thrust into the afflicted 
cliildren, and I saw Gallows Hill, where the hapless 
victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death- 
warrant remained the most vivid color of my experi- 
ence of the tragedy; I had no need to invite myself to 
a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of red in my 
memory. 

16 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and 
who was transfigured to poetry in my sense by the 
fact that he used to voyage to the African coast for 
palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, 
and showed me the Custom-house, which I desired 
to see because it was in the preface to the Scarlet Let- 
ter. But I perceived that he did not share my enthusi- 
asm for the author, and I became more and more sen- 
sible that in Salem air there was a cool undercurrent 
of feeling about him. No doubt the place was not 
altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had 
given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupt- 
ed quiet of its own flattering thoughts of itself; but 
when it came to hearing a young lady say she knew a 
girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, 
it seemed to the devout young pilgrim from_ the West 
that something more of love for the great romancer 
would not have been too much for him. Hawthorne 
had already had his say, however, and he had not used 
his native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, 
the advantages to any place of having a great genius 
born and reared in its midst are so doubtful that it 
might be well for localities designing to become the 
birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice 
about it. Perhaps only the largest capitals, like Lon- 
don and Paris, and New York and Chicago, ought to 
risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable per- 
versity, and will seldom come into the world in the 
large cities, which are alone without the sense of neigh- 
borhood, and the personal susceptibilities so unfavor- 
able to the practice of the literary art. 

I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference* 

to her greatest name, or her reluctance from it, that I 

got a clearer impression of Salem in some other respects 

than I should have had if I had been invited there to 

B 17 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. 
For the first time I saw an old New England town, 
I do not know but the most characteristic, and took 
into my young Western consciousness the fact of a 
more complex civilization than I had yet known. My 
whole life had been passed in a region where men were 
just beginning ancestors, and the conception of family 
was very imperfect. Literatvire of course was full of 
it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theo- 
retically ignorant of its manifestations ; but I had 
hitherto carelessly supposed that family was nowhere 
regarded seriously in America except in Virginia, 
where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. 
But now I found myself confronted with it in its an- 
cient houses, and heard its names pronounced with a 
certain consideration, which I dare say was as much 
their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The 
names were all strange, and all indifferent to me, but 
those fine square wooden mansions, of a tasteful archi- 
tecture, and a pale buff -color, withdrawing themselves 
in quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an im- 
pression of family as an actuality and a force which 
I had never had before, but which no Westerner can 
yet understand the East without taking into account. 
I do not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact 
of vital import then; I think I rather regarded it as 
a color to be used in any aesthetic study of the local 
conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even 
for literary purposes, than the steeple which the cap- 
tain pointed out as the first and last thing he saw when 
he came and went on his long voyages, or than the 
great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and whicli 
I related to the tree that stood 

"Auf brennender Felsenwand." 
18 










\ 1 ^S^: 










^i^ 









MY FIRST VISIT TO XEW ENGLAND 

WHiether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, 
or was a sort only suitable to be the dream of a lonely 
fir-tree in the North on a cold height, I am in doubt 
to this day. 

I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring 
industry of Lynn was penetrating Salem, and that 
the ancient haunt of the witches and the birthplace 
of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a 
great shoe-town ; but my concern was less for its mem- 
ories and sensibilities than for an odious duty which I 
owed that industry, together with all the others in New 
England. Before I left home I had promised my ear- 
liest publisher that I would undertake to edit, or com- 
pile, or do something literary to, a work on the oper- 
ation of the more distinctive mechanical inventions 
of our country, which he had conceived the notion 
of publishiniz: by subscription. He had furnished me, 
the most inimechanical of liuniankind, witli a letter 
addressed generally to the great mills and factories 
of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their 
mysteries to me for the purposes of this volum(\ His 
letter had the effect of shutting up some of them like 
clams, and others it put upon their guard against my 
researches, lest I should seize the secret of their special 
inventions and publish it to the world. I could not 
tell the managers that I was both morally and mentally 
iiicai)al)le of this; that they might have explained and 
demonstrated thr ])roperties and functions of their 
most recondite machinery, and upon examination 
afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but 
a few v(Tses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in 
my head. S<1 T had to suffer in several places from 
their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness 
of their ingenious engines, or else endure the pangs 
of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long as 

19 



LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no indus- 
try in Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant 
girls, in their Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing 
the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached 
Portland my troubles began. I went with that young 
minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry, 
where they were casting some sort of ironmongery, 
and inspected the process from a distance beyond any 
chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly 
uncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any 
practical use. A manufactory wdiere they did some- 
thing with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first 
time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said 
to myself that probably all the other industries of Port- 
land were as reserved, and I would not seek to explore 
them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred 
again. If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, 
ought not I to go and inspect their processes? This 
was a question which would not answer itself to my 
satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I 
could see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that 
Lynn was such a little way from Boston that I could 
readily run up there, if I did not wish to examine the 
shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I 
would run up from Boston, but in order to do this I 
must first go to Boston. 



VII 

I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw 
Boston, but however the fact may be, I am sure that T 
decided it would be better to see shoemaking in Lynn, 
where I really did see it, thirty years later. For the 
purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with 
looking at a machine in Haverhill, which chewed a 

20 







'-/* 



m 



, V^ ^ .-, - «►•<•>•»* r-'C""' '^•~ -«-y~*v-' > t 

L/*-~ «,. '^w'S/** ^-^.^A."' /-^-" '/r-^/vw^ 












-r-*^; 



It^ t(-o..<»^^'""' 






,A;,/<./^,(//<'.^> 



y/«</ <■„ 



/.. //. 



'U 

^^^ 






KETUUN WAKKANT OF SHERIFF GEOltC^K C(»it- 
WIN FOR HANGING BRIDGET BISHOP 



MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped it out of its iron jaws 
with an indifference as great as my own, and probably 
as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be 
unjust to that machine; heaven knows I would not 
wrong it ; and I must confess that my head had no room 
in it for the conception of any machinery but the myth- 
ological, which, also I despised, in my revulsion from 
the eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day. 

I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many 
years just how or when'I got to Haverhill, or whether 
it was before or after I had been in Salem. There is an 
apparitional quality in my presences, at this point or 
that, in the dim past ; but I hope that, for the credit of 
their order, ghosts are not commonly taken with such 
trivial things as I was. For instance, in Haverhill I 
was much interested by the sight of a young man, com- 
ing gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in 
peg-top trousers so much more peg-top than my own that 
I seemed to be wearing mere spring-bottoms in com- 
parison; and in a day when every one who respected 
himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this 
youth had one no wider than a shoestring, and red at 
that, while mine measured almost an inch, and was 
black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro min- 
strels, w^ho were to give a concert that night, and he 
had a right to excel in fashion. 

I will suppose, for convenience' sake, that I visited 
Haverhill, too, before I reached Boston: somehow that 
shoe-pegging machine must come in, and it may as well 
come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston, 
there were perhaps industries which it would have been 
well for me to celebrate, but I either made believe there 
were none, or else I honestly forgot all about them. In 
either case I released myself altogether to the literary 
and historical associations of the place. I need not say 

21 



LITEKAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather sur- 
prised me to find that the literary associations of Bos- 
ton referred so largely to Cambridge. I did not know 
much about Cambridge, except that it was the seat of 
the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had 
been, professor; and somehow I had not realized it as 
the home of these poets. That was rather stupid of me, 
but it is best to owti the truth, and afterward I came to 
know the place so well that I may safely confess my 
earlier ignorance. 

I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, 
which was still one of tlie first hostelries of the country, 
and I must have inquired my way to Cambridge there ; 
but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge 
horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the 
driver my anxieties as to why he should be starting 
east when I had been told that Cambridge was west of 
Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic 
manner of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge 
by the route he had taken. 

The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way 
massed themselves in the '^ groves of academe " at the 
Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of " Old Har- 
vard's scholar factories red," then far fe.wer than now. 
It must have been in vacation, for I met no one as I 
wandered through the college yard, trying to make up 
my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell lived ; 
for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not 
only taken the poems I sent him, but he had printed 
two of them in a single number of the Atlantic, and had 
even written me a little note about them, which I wore 
next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it 
out; and so I thought I might fitly report myself to 
him. But I have always been helpless in finding my 
way, and I was still depressed by my failure to con- 

22 



MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

vince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong 
road. I let several people go by without questioning 
them, and those I did ask abashed me farther by not 
knowing what I wanted to know. When I had remitted 
my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an 
open month and an inquiring eye, whom I never after- 
wards made out in Cambridge, addressed me with a 
hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I 
thought this would give me time to embolden myself 
for the meeting with the editor of the Atlantic if I 
should ever find him, and I went with that kind old 
man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot 
where Washington stood when he took command of the 
continental forces, said that he had a branch of it, and 
that if I V70uld come to his house with him he would 
give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter 
him into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I 
dissembled my purpose and pretended a passion for a 
piece of the historic elm, and the old man led me not 
only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed 
me off a block so generous that I could not get it into 
my pocket. I feigned the gratitude which I could see 
that he expected, and then I took courage to put my 
question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in 
the past, and cared for history and not literature. He 
confessed that he could not tell me where to find Lowell ; 
but he did not forsake me; he set forth with me upon 
the street again, and let no man pass without asking 
him. In the end we met one who was able to say where 
Mr. Lowell w^as, and I found him at last in a little 
study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned house near 
the Delta. 

Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he 
had just reached this thirty years after, when he died; 
but I doubt if he was ever after a greater power in his 

23 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

own country, or more completely embodied the literary 
aspiration which would not and could not part itself 
from the love of freedom and the hope of justice. For 
the sake of these he had been willing to suffer the re- 
proach which followed their friends in the earlier days 
of the anti-slavery struggle. He had outlived the re- 
proach long before; but the fear of his strength re- 
mained with those who had felt it, and he had not made 
himself more generally loved by the Fable for Critics 
than by the Bigloiv Papers, probably. But in the 
Vision of Sir Launfal and the Legend of Brittany 
he had won a liking if not a listening far wider than his 
humor and his wit had got him; and in his lectures on 
the English poets, given not many years before he came 
to the charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself 
easily the wisest and finest critic in our language. He 
was already, more than any American poet, 

" Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love," 

and he held a place in the public sense which no other 
author among us has held. I had myself never been 
a great reader of his poetry, when I met him, though 
when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father 
repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war 
and slavery and the war for slavery upon Mexico, and 
later I had read those criticisms of English poetry, and 
I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort ; but 
my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love 
for his tender rhyme, Auf Wiedersehen, which I can- 
not yet read without something of the young pathos it 
first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness some- 
how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my 
fancy and held my allegiance as a character, as a man ; 
and I am neither sorry nor ashamed that I was abashed 

24 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

when I first came into his presence; and that in spite 
of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before 
him. He was then forty-one years old, and nineteen 
my senior, and if there had been nothing else to awo 
me, I might well have been quelled by the disparity of 
our ages. But I have always been willing and even 
eager to do homage to men who have done something, 
and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare 
sort I wished to do something in, myself. I could 
never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that 
I am proud to recognize ; and I had before Lowell some 
such feeling as an obscure subaltern might have before 
his general. He was by nature a bit of a disciplinarian, 
and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare 
say he let me feel whatever difference there was, as 
helplessly as I felt it. At the first encounter with 
people he always was apt to have a certain frosty shy- 
ness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned win- 
ters of his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till 
he had made you av/are of his quality: then no one 
could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then he 
made you free of his whole heart ; but you must be his 
captive before he could do that. His whole personality 
had now an instant charm for me; I could not keep 
my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a 
certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from 
under his white forehead, shadowed with auburn hair 
untouched by age; or from the smile that shaped the 
auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color 
the Christ-look which Page's portrait has flattered in it. 
His voice had as great a fascination for me as his 
face. The vibrant tenderness and the crisp clearness of 
the tones, the perfect modulation, the clear enunciation, 
the exquisite accent, the elect diction — I did not know 
enough then to know that these were the gifts, these 

25 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

were the graces, of one from whose tongue our rough 
English came music such as I should never hear from 
anv other. In this speech there was nothing of our 
slipshod xAmerican slovenliness, but a truly Italian 
conscience and an artistic sense of beauty in the in- 
strument. 

I saw, before he sat do^vn across his writing-table 
from me, that he was not far from the medium height ; 
but his erect carriage made the most of his five feet and 
odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, 
and he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he 
found himself at greater ease with it, when he began 
to chat, or rather to let me show what manner of young 
man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of 
the trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help 
dragging in something about Heine's search for Borne, 
when he went to see him in Frankfort; but I felt at 
once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an im- 
passioned lover of Cambridge, which was truly his 
patria, in the Italian sense, that it must have hurt him. 
to be unknown to any one in it ; he said, a little dryly, 
that he should not have thought I would have so much 
difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not 
his own house, which he was out of for the time. Then 
he spoke to me of Heine, and when I showed my ardor 
for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious 
criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem 
I sent him, for the long time it had been unacknowl- 
edged, to make sure that it was not a translation. He 
asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh 
origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this 
harmless enough. When I said I had tried hard to be- 
lieve that I was at least the literary descendant of Sir 
James Howels, he corrected me gently with " James 
Howel," and took down a volume of the Familiar Let- 

26 




-^ 



.^^ 






"GIRLS IN EVANGELINE HATS AND KIRTLES TOSSING HAY 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

ters from the shelves behind him to prove me wrong. 
This was always his habit, as I found afterwards: 
when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get 
it and read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of 
hoarded sweetness in the words. It visibly vexed him 
if they showed him in the least mistaken ; but 

" The love he bore to learning was at fault " 

for this foible, and that other of setting people right if 
he thought them wrong. I could not assert myself 
against his version of Howel's name, for my edition of 
his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was obliged to 
0T\Ti that the name was spelt in several different ways 
in it. He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the 
form likest my own, with the title which the pleasant 
old turncoat ought to have had from the many masters 
he served according to their many minds, but never 
had except from that erring edition. He did not af- 
flict me for it, though; probably it amused him too 
much ; he asked me about the West, and when he found 
that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he 
seemed even better pleased, and said he had always 
fancied that human nature was laid out on rather a 
larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very 
little of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, 
and I do not think it now ; human nature has had more 
ground to spread over in the West ; that is all ; but " it 
was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign." 
He said he liked to hear of the differences between the 
different sections, for what we had most to fear in our 
country was a wearisome sameness of type. 

He did not say now, or at any other time during the 
many years I knew him, any of those slighting things 
of the West which I had so often to suffer from Eastern 
people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He 

27 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

asked me what way I had taken in coming to New Eng- 
land, and when I told him, and began to rave of the 
beauty and qnaintness of French Canada, and to pour 
out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had 
now lost all its frost. Yes, Quebec was a bit of the 
seventeenth century ; it was in many w^ays more French 
than France, and its people spoke the language of Vol- 
taire, with the accent of Voltaire's time. 

I do not remember what else he talked of, though 
once I remembered it wdth what I believed an inef- 
faceable distinctness. I set nothing of it down at the 
time ; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for 
a Cincinnati paper ; and I was severely bent upon keep- 
ing all personalities out of them. This was very well, 
but I could wish now that I had transgressed at least 
so far as to report some of the things that Lowell said ; 
for the paper did not print my letters, and it would 
have been perfectly safe, and very useful for the present 
purpose. But perhaps he did not say anything very 
memorable; to do that you must have something posi- 
tive in your listener ; and I was the mere response, the 
hollow echo, that 3^outh must be in like circumstances. 
I was all the time afraid of wearing my welcome out, 
and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have staid. 
I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he 
should have undertaken to show me the way across-lots, 
but this was what he did ; and when we came to a fence, 
which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his hands 
on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried 
twice, and then laughed at his failure, but not with 
any great pleasure, and he was not content till a 
third trial carried him across. Then he said, " I 
commonly do that the first time," as if it were a 
frequent habit with him, while I remained discreetly 
silent, and for that moment at least felt myself the 

28 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. 
He had, indeed, mnch of the boy in liim to the last, and 
he parted with each hour of his youth reluctantly, pa- 
thetically. 

VIII 

We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field 
to what must have been ^orth Avenue, and there he left 
me. But before he let me go he held my hand while he 
could say that he wished me to dine with him ; only, he 
was not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine 
with him at the Parker House in Boston, and would 
send me word of the time later. 

I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening 
time in viewing the wonders of Boston, and visiting the 
historic scenes and places in it and about it. I certainly 
went over to Charlestown, and ascended Bunker Hill 
Monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the im- 
memorial man-of-war begun in Jackson's time was then 
silently stretching itself under its long shed in a poetic 
arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for its com- 
pletion had been some kind of enchantment. In Bos- 
ton, I early presented my letter of credit to the pub- 
lisher it was drawn upon, not that I needed money at 
the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if it 
would be honored; and a literary attache of the house 
kindly went about with me, and showed me the life of 
the city. A great city it seemed to me then, and a seeth- 
ing vortex of business as well as a w^hirl of gayety, as 
I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade con- 
cert at Copeland's restaurant in Tremont Row. Proba- 
bly I brought some idealizing force to bear upon it, for 
I was not all so strange to the world as I must seem; 
perhaps I accounted for quality as w^ell as quantity in 
mj impressions of the New England metropolis, and 

29 



y 



LITEKAEY FEIENDS Ai\D ACQUAINTANCE 

aggrandized it in the ratio of its literary importance. 
It seemed to me old, even after Quebec, and very likely 
I credited the actual town with all the dead and gone 
Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not it 
was no fault of my cicerone, who thought even more 
of the city he showed me than I did. I do not know 
now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to 
live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I 
was often tormented with the vision of a spectacled 
face like his, but not like enough to warrant me in ad- 
dressing him. 

He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first 
visit, which would sometimes return and possess again 
the city I came to know so familiarly in later years, 
and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of 
my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experi- 
ences of people in my books, but I find very little of it 
in mv memory. This is like a web of fraved old lace, 
which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of 
its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once 
so distinct in it. There are the narrow streets, stretch- 
ing saltwards to the docks, which I haunted for their 
quaintness, and there is Faneuil Hall, which I cared 
to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had 
spoken in it than because Otis and Adams had. There 
is the old Colonial House, and there is the State House, 
which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping 
before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock 
House where it is incredibly no more, and there are 
the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue, and the 
other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their base- 
ments left hollowed in the made land, which the gravel 
trains were yet making out of the westward hills. There 
is the Public Garden, newly planned and planted, but 
without the massive bridge destined to make so ungrate- 

30 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

fully little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all 
very vague, and I could easily believe now that it was 
some one else who saw it then in my place. 

I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same 
day that I saw Lowell, but wisely came back to my 
hotel in Boston, and tried to realize the fact. L went 
out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio, whom 
I ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn 
together, and I viewed its monuments with a reverence 
which I dare say their artistic quality did not merit. 
But I am not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not 
quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel 
of the cemetery, imstoried as it was, gave me, with its 
half-dozen statues standing or sitting about, an emotion 
such as I am afraid L could not receive now from the 
Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Croce in one. 
I tried hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made 
believe that I thought this thing and that thing in the 
place moved me with its fitness or beauty ; but the truth 
is that I had no taste in anything but literature, and 
did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experi- 
enced. 

I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old 
Cambridge streets, though, and I had a real and instant 
pleasure in the yellow colonial houses, with their white 
corners and casements and their green blinds, that 
lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed 
through to Mount Auburn. The most beautiful among 
them w^as the most interesting for me, for it was the 
house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it 
before, pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and 
I would not let him see that I valued the first sight of 
it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I might be so 
favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked 
about him of those who knew, they said, " Oh, he is at 

31 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Nahant," and I thought tliat Nahant must be a great 
way off, and at any rate I did not feel authorized to go 
to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of The 
Amber Gods, \yho lived at N ewburyport, I was told, as if 
I should know where Newburyport was ; I did not know, 
and I hated to ask. Besides, it did not seem so simple 
as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young lady 
simply because I was infatuated with her literature; 
even as the envoy of all the infatuated young people of 
Columbus, I could not quite do this; and when I got 
home, I had to account for my failure as best I could. 
Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, 
which I then very much longed to have. They said, 
" Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury," but that put him at 
an indefinite distance, and without the introduction I 
never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in 
quest of liim. In the end, I saw no one in New Eng- 
land whom I was not presented to in the regular way, 
except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call 
upon in my quality of contributor, and from the 
acquaintance I had with him by letter. I neither praise 
nor blame myself for this ; it was my shyness that with- 
held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm 
in seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if 
the famous man resents the wish of people to look upon 
him without some measure, great or little, of affectation. 
There are bores everywhere, but he is likelier to find 
them in the wonted figures of society than in those 
young people, or old people, who come to him in the 
love of what he has done. I am well aware how furi- 
ously Tennyson sometimes met his worshippers, and 
how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are little 
specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester 
celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known 
some of them caress adorers who seemed hardly worthy 

32 



MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

of their kindness ; but that was better than to have hurt 
any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the 
rules that govern us with common men. 

IX 

My business relations were with the house that so 
promptly honored my letter of credit. This house 
had published in the East the campaign life of Lincoln 
which I had lately written, and I dare say would have 
published the volume of poems I had written earlier 
with my friend Piatt, if there had been any public 
for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the book on 
the counters. But all my literary affiliations were 
with Ticknor & Fields, and it was the Old Corner 
Book-Store on Washington Street that drew my heart 
as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. 
After verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I 
wished to verify its publishers, and it very fitly hap- 
pened that when I was sho^vn into Mr. Fields's little 
room at the back of the store, with its window looking 
upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books 
and prints, he had just got the magazine sheets of a 
poem of mine from the Cambridge printers. He was 
then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for Ameri- 
can things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in 
us, though I did not know this then, and could not ac- 
count for it in the kindness he expressed for my poem. 
He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied had 
not read my poem ; but he seemed to know what it was 
from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I 
had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and 
then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from 
it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green 
cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much 
c 33 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt 
myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though 
I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five 
dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The 
publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the 
transaction ; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he 
gathered them np and put them into my hand, and 
said, " I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold." 
But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, 
and quenched for the moment all my pleasure and 
pride. It was The Pilot's Story, which I suppose has 
had as much acceptance as anytliing of mine in verse 
(I do not boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had 
attempted to treat in it a phase of the national trag- 
edy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a Mississippi 
steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the 
slave-girl who is the mother of his child, and when 
he tells her, she breaks out upon him with the demand : 

" What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in 
Saint Louis?" 

I had thought this very well, and natural and sim- 
ple, but a fatal proof-reader had not thought it well 
enough, or simple and natural enough, and he had 
made the line read: 

r " What will you say to our boy when he cries for * Ma* there 
) in Saint Louis?" 

He had even had the inspiration to quote the word 
he preferred to the one I had written, so that there was 
no merciful possibility of mistaking it for a misprint, 
and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr. 
Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked 
over some letters, and he either felt the chill of my 
horror, or I made some sign or sound of dismay that 
caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could 

34 



MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he 
might have liked to laugh, for it was cruelly funny, 
but he did not; he was concerned for the magazine 
as well as for me. He declared that Avhen he first read 
the line he had thought I could not have written it so, 
and he agreed with me that it would kill the poem if 
it came out in that shape. He instantly set about re- 
pairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found 
that the whole edition of that sheet had been printed, 
and the air blackened round me again, lighted up here 
and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper wit at 
my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew 
what I should have said of such a thing myself, if it 
had been another's. But the publisher at once decided 
that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went away 
weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. 
Afterwards it appeared that the line had passed the 
first proof-reader as I wrote it, but that the final reader 
had entered so sympathetically into the realistic inten- 
tion of my poem as to contribute the modification 
which had nearly been my end. 



As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to 
the day and hour of the dinner Lowell made for me; 
and I really think, looking at myself impersonally, 
and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that 
it would have been a great pity if I had not. The 
dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two, 
and the table was laid for four people in some little 
upper room at Parker's, which I was never afterwards 
able to make sure of. Lowell was already there when I 
came, and he presented me, to my inexpressible delight 
and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was there with him. 

35 



LITEKAEY FEIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonder- 
ful second youth which his fame flowered into long after 
the world thought he had completed the cycle of his 
literary life. He had already received full recogni- 
tion as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imag- 
ination, and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers 
advanced his name indefinitely beyond the bounds 
which most immortals would have found range enough. 
The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the 
minds of men, and time had not dulled in any measure 
the sense of its novelty. His readers all fondly iden- 
ified him with his work; and I fully expected to find 
myself in the Autocrat's presence when I met Dr. 
Holmes. But the fascination was none the less for 
that reason; and the winning smile, the wise and hu- 
morous glance, the whole genial manner was as impor- 
tant to me as if I had foreboded something altogether 
diilerent. I found him physically of the Napoleonic 
height which spiritually overtops the Alps, and I could 
look into his face without that unpleasant effort which 
giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of ^yq 
feet four. 

A little while after, Fields came in, and then our 
number and my pleasure w^ere complete. 

Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the 
whole affair could have happened to a like youth at 
such a point in his career; and when I sat down with 
Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I 
felt through and through the dramatic perfection of 
the event. The kindly Autocrat recognized some such 
quality of it in terms which w^ere not the less precious 
and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no 
reason to think that he had yet read any of my poor 
verses, or had me otherwise than wholly on trust from 
Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host, and said, 



MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

with a laughing look at me, ^^ Well, James, this is 
something like the apostolic succession; this is the lay- 
ing on of hands." I took his sweet and caressing irony 
as he meant it; but the charm of it went to my head 
long before any drop of wine, together with the charm 
of hearing him and Lowell calling each other James 
and Wendell, and of finding them still cordially boys 
together. 

I would gladly have glimmered before those great 
lights in the talk that followed, if I could have thought 
of anything brilliant to say, but I could not, and so I 
let them shine w^ithout a ray of reflected splendor from 
me. It w^as such talk as I had, of course, never heard 
before, and it is not saying enough to say that I have 
never heard such talk since except from these two men. 
It was as light and kind as it was deep and true, and it 
ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle 
of Doctor Holmes's wit, and the constant glow of Low- 
ell's incandescent sense. From time to time Fields camo 
in with one of his delightful stories (sketches of char- 
acter they were, which he sometimes did not mind cari- 
caturing), or with some criticism of the literary situa- 
tion from his stand-point of both lover and publisher of 
books. I heard fames that I had accepted as proofs of 
power treated as factitious, and witnessed a frankness 
concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not 
dreamed of authors using. When Doctor Holmes under- . 
stood that I wrote for the Saturday Press, which was * 
running amuck among some Bostonian immortalities of 
the day, he seemed willing that I should know they 
were not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I 
should not take the notion of a Mutual Admiration So- 
ciety too seriously, or accept the New York bohemian 
view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did 
not address itself to me, but became an exchange of 

3X 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

thoughts and fancies between himself and Lowell. They 
touched, I remember, on certain matters of technique, 
and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against 
some words that he could not overcome ; for instance, he 
said, nothing could induce him to use 'neath for he- 
neath, no exigency of versification or stress of rhyme. 
Lo-well contended that he would use any word that car- 
ried his meaning ; and I think he did this to the hurt of 
some of his earlier things. He was then probably in 
the revolt against too much literature in literature, 
which every one is destined sooner or later to share; 
there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, 
which he indulged before his thought and phrase mel- 
lowed to one music in his later work. I tacitly agreed 
rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve from 
my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should 
have sided with him: I would have given that or any 
other proof of my devotion. Fields casually mentioned 
that he thought " The Dandelion '' was the most popu- 
larly liked of Lowell's briefer poems, and I made haste 
to say that I thought so too, though I did not really 
think anything about it; and then I was sorry, for I 
could see that the poet did not like it, quite ; and I felt 
that I was duly punished for my dishonesty. 

Hawthorne was named among other authors, proba- 
bly by Fields, whose house had just published his 
" Marble Faun,'' and who had recently come home on 
the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I 
had met Hawthorne yet, and when I confessed that I 
had hardly yet even hoped for such a thing, he smiled 
his winning smile, and said : " Ah, well ! I don't know 
that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is 
like a dim room with a little taper of personality burn- 
ing on the corner of the mantel." 

They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same 
38 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

affection, but the same sense of something mystical and 
remote in him; and every word was priceless to me. 
But these masters of the craft I was 'prentice to probably 
could not have said anything that I should not have 
found wise and well, and I am sure now I should have 
been the loser if the talk had shunned any of the phases 
of human nature which it touched. It is best to find 
that all men are of the same make, and that there are 
certain universal things which interest them as much 
as the supernal things, and amuse them even more. 
There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fond of 
repeating at the menace of any form of the transcen- 
dental, and he liked to warn himself and others with 
his homely, ^' Eemember the dinner-bell." What I re- 
call of the whole effect of a time so happy for me is that 
in all that was said, however high, however fine, we 
were never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and per- 
haps this is the best effect I can leave with the reader. 
It was the first dinner served in courses that I had sat 
dowm to, and I felt that this service gave it a romantic 
importance which the older fashion of the West still 
wanted. Even at Governor Chase's table in Columbus 
the Governor carved ; I knew of the dinner a la Russe, 
as it was then called, only from books; and it was a 
sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive 
dishes. When it came to the black coffee, and then to 
the petits verves of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire 
to atop, it was something that so far transcended my 
home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether 
visionary. 

Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had 
to confess that I did not; but Lowell smoked enough 
for all three, and the spark of his cigar began to show 
in the waning light before we rose from the table. The 
time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for 

39 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

me, had to come to an end, as all times must, and when 
I shook hands with Lowell in parting, he overwhelmed 
me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he 
would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see 
Lowell again during my stay in Boston; but Doctor 
Holmes asked me to tea for the next evening, and Fields 
said I must come to breakfast with him in the morning. 



XI 

I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, 
and to the kindness afterwards to pass between us for 
many years, the whole aspect of the publisher when I 
first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full " beard 
as broad as ony spade," that flowed from his throat in 
Homeric curls, were touched with the first frost. He 
had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen as they were kind, 
twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of 
his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch 
tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional 
broadcloth with us in the West, though I had sent to 
New York for a rough suit, and so felt myself not quite 
unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the 
London tailor. 

Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial 
soul would let me ; and if I might I should like to sug- 
gest to the literary youth of this day some notion of the 
importance of his name to the literary youth of my day. 
He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & 
Fields, but he was by no means a silent partner on the 
economic side. No one can forecast the fortune of a new 
book, but he knew as well as any publisher can knoAV 
not only whether a book was good, but whether the read- 
er would think so ; and I suppose that his house made 
as few bad guesses, along with their good ones, as any 

iQ 



I.IY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

house that ever tried the uncertain temper of the public 
with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the 
plain brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was 
more or less intimately associated with their literature ; 
and those who were not mistaken in thinking De Quin- 
cey one of the delightfulest authors in the world, were 
especially grateful to the man who first edited his writ- 
ings in book form, and proud that this edition was the 
effect of American sympathy with them. At that day, 
I believed authorship the noblest calling in the world, 
and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler. The 
great authors I had met were to me the sum of great- 
ness, and if I could not rank their publisher with them 
by virtue of equal achievement, I handsomely brevetted 
him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in the 
visible measure of it. 

In his house beside the Charles, and in the close 
neighborhood of Doctor Holmes, I found an odor and 
an air of books such as I fancied might belong to the 
famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that 
friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious 
spirit which knew how to welcome me, and make the 
least of my shyness and strangeness, and the most of 
the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though 
my host of that rapturous moment has many years been 
of those who are only with us unseen and unheard. I 
remember his burlesque pretence that morning of an in- 
extinguishable grief when I owned that I had never 
eaten blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning 
to the pathos of tlie fact that there should be a region 
of the earth where blueberry cake was unkno\\Ti. We 
breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out 
through leaves and flowers upon the river's coming and 
going tides, and wliose walls were covered with the faces 
and the autographs of all the contemporary poets and 

il 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

novelists. The Fieldses had sjient some days with 
Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. 
Fields had much to tell of him, how he looked, how he 
smoked, how he read aloud, and how he said, when he 
asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, 
'^ Come up and see the sad English sunset !" which had 
an instant value to me such as some rich verse of his 
might have had. I was very new to it all, how new I 
could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I 
breathed in that atmosphere as if in the return from 
life-long exile. Still I patriotically bragged of the 
West a little, and I told them proudly that in Columbus 
no book since Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold so well as 
The Marble Faun. This made the effect that I wished, 
but whether it was true or not, heaven knows; I only 
know that I heard it from our leading bookseller, and 
I made no question of it myself. 

After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and 
I lingered, while Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to 
shelf in the library, and dazzled me with the sight of 
authors' copies, and vohmies invaluable with the auto- 
graphs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names 
were dear to me from my love of their work. Every- 
where was some souvenir of the living celebrities my 
hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that 
English sojourn in days before England embittered her- 
self to us during our civil war ? Not Tennyson only, 
but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade, but 
Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from 
converse so recent with them that it was as if I heard 
their voices in their echoed words. 

I do not remember how long I stayed ; I remember I 
was afraid of staying too long, and so I am sure I did 
not stay as long as I should have liked. But I have 
not the least notion how I got away, and I am not cer- 

42 




JAMES T. FIELDS 
(About 1870) 



MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

tain where I spent the rest of a day that began in the 
clouds, but had to be ended on the common earth. I 
suj)pose I gave it mostly to wandering about the city, 
and partly to recording my impressions of it for that 
newspaper which never published them. The summer 
weather in Boston, with its sunny heat struck through 
and through with the coolness of the sea, and its clear 
air untainted wdth a breath of smoke, I have always 
loved, but it had then a zest unknown before; and I 
should have thought it enough simply to be alive in it. 
But everywhere I came upon something that fed my 
famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and how- 
ever the day passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can 
only recall my breathless first sight of the Public Li- 
brary and of the Athenseum Gallery : great sights then, 
which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards 
eclipsed for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these 
elder treasuries of literature and art between break- 
fasting with the Autocrat's publisher in the morning, 
and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, 
and that made a whole world's difference. 



XII 



The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable 
to this generation, which knows the thing only as a 
mild form of afternoon reception; but I suppose that 
in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral re- 
public. Tea was the meal people asked people to when 
they wished to sit at long leisure and large ease ; it came 
at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or seven ; and one 
went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied 
domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I 
fancy these did not vary much from East to West, except 

43 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

that we had a Southern touch in our fried chicken and 
corn bread ; but at the Autocrat's tea table the cheering 
cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He 
asked me if I knew it, and I said it was English break- 
fast tea; for I had drunk it at the publisher's in the 
morning, and was willing not to seem strange to it. 
" Ah, yes," he said ; " but this is the flower of the sou- 
chong; it is the blossom, the poetry of tea," and then 
he told me how it had been given him by a friend, a 
merchant in the China trade, which used to flourish in 
Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this deli- 
cate beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, 
and I fancy that the plant ceased to bloom when the 
trafiic fell into decay. 

The Autocrat's windows had the same outlook upon 
the Charles as the publisher's, and after tea we went up 
into a back parlor of the same orientation, and saw the 
sunset die over the water, and the westering flats and 
hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier 
close, and our talk took something of the mystic color- 
ing that the heavens gave those mantling expanses. It 
was chiefly his talk, but I have always found the best 
talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, 
and a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I 
had to say from him and from the unbroken circle of 
kindred intelligences about him. I saw him then in 
the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards 
to better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of 
the things that people perhaps once liked to deal with 
more than they do now; of the intimations of immor- 
tality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all 
those messages from the tremulous nerves which wo 
take for prophecies. I was not ashamed, before his 
tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that had 
lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, 

U 




Ikr- 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

from a time of broken health and troubled spirit; and 
I remember the exquisite tact in him which recognized 
them as things common to all, however peculiar in each, 
which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I 
might have in them, and yet gave me the companionship 
of the whole race in their experience. We spoke of fore- 
bodings and presentiments; we approached the mystic 
confines of the world from which no traveller has yet 
returned with a passport en regie and properly vise: 
and he held his light course through these filmy impal- 
pabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific 
conscience that refuses either to deny the substance of 
things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, 
so weird did my fortune of being there and listening 
to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, 
for all the reality I felt in myself. 

I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my 
boyhood, and with what joy and gain; and he was pa- 
tient of these futilities, and I have no doubt imagined 
the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of 
the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps 
were lighted, and we all came back to our dear little 
firm-set earth, he began to question me about my native 
region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall 
his asking me what was the fashionable religion in 
Columbus, or the Church that socially corresponded to 
the Unitarian Church in Boston. He had first to clarify 
my intelligence as to what Unitarianism was; we had 
Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I under- 
stood, I answered from such vantage as my o^vn wholly 
outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I thought most 
of the most respectable people with us were of the Pres- 
byterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, 
but upon the whole the largest number were Presby- 
terians. He found that very strange indeed; and said 

45 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church 
in Boston ; that the New England Calvinists were all of 
the Orthodox Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy 
to me, and then I could confess to one Congregational 
Church in Columbus. 

Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear 
image of our social frame in the West;, but the fault was 
altogether mine, if I did. Such lecturing tours as he 
had made had not taken him among us, as those of 
Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report 
was positive rather than comparative. I was full of 
pride in journalism at that day, and I dare say that I 
vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers 
more than they merited : I should not have been likely 
to wrong them otherwise. It is strange that in all the 
talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather heard froia 
them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, 
though Lincoln had then been nominated by the Repub- 
licans, and the Civil War had practically begun. But 
we did not imagine such a thing in the North ; we rested 
secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the 
South would eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the 
mere love and inveterate habit of fire-eating. 

I rent myself away from the Autocrat's presence as 
early as I could, and as my evening had been too full of 
happiness to sleep upon at once, I spent the rest of the 
night till two in the morning wandering about the 
streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom 
I had met. He was a youth of like literary passions 
with myself, but of such different traditions in every 
possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely reg- 
ulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own des- 
ultory and self-found way must have seemed to him. 
We passed the time in the delight of trying to make 
ourselves kno^\Ti to each other, and in a promise to con- 

46 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

tinue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent 
patience with the necessarily insoluble problem. 

XIII 

I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction 
to Ha^\i:horne which Lowell had offered me, for when 
it came, with a little note of kindness and counsel for 
myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, 
it was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till 
Monday before I started. I do not recall what I did 
with the time, except keep myself from making it a 
burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the 
city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the 
fortune that favored me that Sunday night with a 
view of the old Granary Burying-ground on Tremont 
Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every 
path in the place, wreaking myself in such meagre 
emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin 
family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my West- 
ern modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity 
which so many of the dim inscriptions afforded. I do 
not think that I have ever known anything practically 
older than these monuments, though I have since 
supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure 
that I was more deeply touched by the epitaph of a 
[ poor little Puritan maiden who died at sixteen in the 
early sixteen- thirties than afterwards by the tomb of 
Csecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried 
to put into verse when I got back to my room in the 
hotel was none the less genuine because it would not 
lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing 
but pathos to this day. 

I am not able to say how I reached the town of 
Lowell, where I went before going to Concord, that 

47 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

I might ease the unhappy conscience I had about those 
factories which I hated so much to see, and have it 
clean for the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of 
visions whom I was authorized to molest in any air- 
castle where I might find him. I only know that I 
went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, 
which with their whirring spools, the ceaseless flight 
of their shuttles, and the bewildering sight and sound 
of all their mechanism have since seemed to me the 
death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not 
the captivity of those who tended them. But then 
I thought it right and well for me to be standing by, 

" With sick and scornful looks averse," 

while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy 
in it, and I got my pitiful literary antipathy away as 
soon as I could, no wiser for the sight of the ingenious 
contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no sad- 
der. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my 
hotel, and watched the long files of the work-worn fac- 
tory-girls stream by, with no concern for them but to 
see which was pretty and which was plain, and with no 
dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten 
hours' work a day in those hideous mills and lodged 
them in the barracks where they rested from their toil. 

XIV 

I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between 
Lowell and Concord, past meadow walls, and under 
the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and through 
the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the 
freshness of the summer morning? By a blessed 
chance I found that there was such a stage in 1860, 
and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to 

48 



MY FIRST VISIT TO KEW ENGLAND 

Boston and np to Concord as I must have had to do by 
train. The journey gave me the intimacy of the N^ew 
England country as I could have had it in no other 
fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the sum- 
mer sweetness w^hich I have often steeped my soul in 
since. The meadows were newly mown, and the air 
was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long win- 
rows among the brown bowlders, or capped with can- 
vas in the little haycocks it had been gathered into the 
day before. I was fresh from the affluent farms of 
the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched 
me with a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the 
meagre fields of corn and wheat ; but still the land was 
lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its old farm- 
houses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hill- 
sides, its staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its 
thick-brackened valleys. From West to East the dif- 
ference was as great as I afterwards found it from 
America to Europe, and my impression of something 
quaint and strange was no keener when I saw Old Eng- 
land the next year than w^hen I saw 'New England 
now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and 
I was astonished to find it almost as full of them as at 
home, though they all looked very little, as they well 
might to eyes used to the primeval forests of Ohio. 
The road ran through them from time to time, and 
took their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and 
then issued again in the glisten of the open fields. 

I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we 
drove along; and yes, I suppose I made phrases about 
the young girl who was one of the inside passengers, 
and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat 
worn off, began to sing, and sang most of the way to 
Concord. Perhaps she was not very sage, and I am 
sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but she 
D 49 



LITEKAEY FBIENDS AKD ACQUAINTANCE 

was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a birdlike 
tunableness, so that I would not have her out of the 
memory of that pleasant journey if I could. She was 
long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose 
she w^ould not now point out her fellow-passenger if 
he strolled in the evening by the house where she had 
dismounted, upon her arrival in Concord, and laugh 
and pull another girl away from the window, in the 
high excitement of the prodigious adventure. 



XV 

Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; 
he was to see Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Pris- 
cilla and Zenobia, and Hester Prynne and little Pearl, 
and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and Cover- 
dale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Dona- 
tello and Kenyon; and he had no heart for any such 
poor little reality as that, who could not have been 
got into any story that one could respect, and must 
have been difficult even in a Heinesque poem. 

I wasted that whole evening and the next morning 
in fond delaying, and it was not until after the indif- 
ferent dinner I got at the tavern where I stopped, that 
I found courage to go and present Lowell's letter to 
Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting 
the weird genius only to have kept that letter, for it 
said certain infinitely precious things of me with such 
a sweetness, such a grace as Lowell alone could give 
his praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was 
dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne, and told her of the pang 
I had in parting with it, and she sent it me, doubly en- 
riched by Hawthorne's keeping. But now if I w^ere 
to see him at all I must give up my letter, and I carried 
it in my hand to the door of the cottage he called The 

50 



MY FIRST VISIT TO XEW ENGLAND 

Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very mx)dest 
place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, 
and there was already some preliminary carpentry at 
one end of the cottage, which I saw was to result in an 
addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the road 
before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, 
such as is made in Septimius Felton the scene of the 
involuntary duel between Septimius and the young 
British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming 
quite down to the house, but if this was so I do not 
know what to do with a grassy slope which seems to 
have stretched part way up the hill. As I approached, 
I looked for the tov/er which the author was fabled to 
climb into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the 
ladder up after him; and I wondered whether he 
would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some easier 
means of escaping me. 

The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome 
boy whom I suppose to have been Mr. Julian Haw- 
thorne; and the next moment I found myself in the 
presence of the romancer, who entered from some 
room beyond. He advanced carrying his head with a 
heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I de- 
cided that the word would be pondering. It was 
the pace of a bulky man of fifty, and his head was that 
beautiful head we all know from the many pictures 
of it. But Hawthorne's look was different from that 
of any picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre 
and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have 
been ; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully 
and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil 
which forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. 
It was by no means troubled; it was full of a dark 
repose. Others who knew him better and saw him 
^"bftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remem- 

51 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

ber that one night at Longfellow's table, when one 
of the guests happened to speak of the photograph of 
Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell 
said, after a glance at it, ^' Yes, it's good ; but it hasn't 
his fine accipitral look." 

In the face that confronted me, however, there was 
nothing of keen alertness; but only a sort of quiet, 
patient intelligence, for which I seek the right word in 
vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful eyes ; 
the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the 
fine mouth. Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he 
had a certain effect which I remember, of seeming to 
have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He 
was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him any- 
where I should have instantly felt him to be a per- 
sonage. 

I must have given him the letter myself, for I have 
no recollection of parting with it before, but I only 
remember his offering me his hand, and making me 
shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments 
of the demoralization which followed his hospitable 
attempts in me, he asked if I would not like to go up 
on his hill with him and sit there, where he smoked in 
the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I 
said that I did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, 
and we climbed the hill together. At the top, where 
there was an outlook in the pines over the Concord 
meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place 
on it beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he 
talked while he smoked. Heaven preserved me from 
the folly of trying to tell him how much his books had 
been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, 
I think we got on better for this interposition. He 
asked me about Lowell, I dare say, for I told him of 
my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this 



:my fiest visit to xetv exglaxd 

seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because 
he was so lately from Europe, where our great men 
are always seen through the wrong end of the tele- 
scope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and ask- 
ed me whether I cared as much for meeting them as 
I should care for meeting the famous English authors. 
I professed that I cared much more, though whether 
this was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Haw- 
thorne doubted it at the time. But he said nothing 
in comment, and went on to speak generally of Europe 
and America. He was curious about the West, which 
he seemed to fancy much more purely American, and 
said he would like to see some part of the country on 
which the shadow (or. if I must be precise, the damned 
shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I 
thought the West must finally be characterized by the 
Germans, whom we had in great numbers, and, purely 
from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some 
proofs of their present influence, though I could think 
of none outside of politics, which I thought they affect- 
ed wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne was a Demo- 
crat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but 
he had no more to say about the fateful election then 
pending than Holmes or Lowell had. 

With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, 
he began somehow to speak of women, and said he 
had never seen a woman whom he thought quite beau- 
tiful. In the same way he spoke of the Xew England 
temperament, and suggested that the apparent coldness 
in it was also real, and that the suppression of emotion 
for generations would extinguish it at last. Then he 
questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and 
whether I had seen any of the notable people. I an- 
swered that I had met no one but himself, as yet, but 
I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I 

53 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

did not think it needful to say that I wished to see 
Thoreau quite as much because he had suffered in the 
cause of John Brown as because he had written the 
books which had taken me; and when he said that 
Thoreau prided himself on coming nearer the heart 
of a pine-tree than any other human being, I could say 
honestly enough that I would rather come near the 
heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw 
that it did not displease him, when he asked whether I 
was not going to see his next neighbor Mr. Alcott, 
and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That 
surprised as well as pleased him ; he remarked, with 
whatever intention, that there was nothing like recog- 
nition to make a man modest ; and he entered into some 
account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not 
be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his in- 
fluence was of the immediate sort that makes a man 
important to his townsmen while he is still strange 
to his countrymen. 

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, 
and said certain of the pleasant fields below us be- 
longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top, and if he 
could have his way those arable fields should be grown 
up to pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and 
in the hour that we spent together, his whiffs w^ere of 
the desultory and unfinal character of his words. 
When we went down, he asked me into his house again, 
and would have me stay to tea, for which we found 
the table laid. But there was a great deal of silence in 
it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy kindness, I 
felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book- 
case, where there were a few books toppling about on 
the half-filled shelves, and said, coldly, " This is my 
library." I knew that men were his books, and though 
I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and 

54 







LARCH WALK, WAYSIDE 

Trees planted by Hawthorue belween Alcotfs House aud Wayside 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

fine that he should care so little, or seem to care so lit- 
tle. Some of his own romances were among the volumes 
on these shelves, and when I put mj finger on the 
BUthedale Romance and said that I preferred that 
to the others, his face lighted up, and he said that he 
believed the Germans liked that best too. 

Upon the whole we parted such good friends that 
Avhen I offered to take leave he asked me how long I 
was to be in Concord, and not only bade me come to see 
him again, but said he would give me a card to Emer- 
son, if I liked. I answered, of course, that I should 
like it beyond all things ; and he wrote on the back of 
his card something which I found, when I got away, to 
be, " I find this young man worthy.'' The quaintness, 
the little stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was 
amusing to one who was not without his sense of humor, 
but the kindness filled me to the throat with joy. In 
fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cor- 
dial as so shy a man could show himself; and I per- 
ceived, with the repose that nothing else can give, the 
entire sincerity of his soul. 

Nothing could have been further from the behavior of 
this very great man than any sort of posing, apparently, 
or a wish to affect me with a sense of his greatness. 1 
saw that he was as much abashed by our encoimter as 
I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, 
but in no ignoble sense was he conscious, and as nearly 
as he could with one so much his younger he made an 
absolute equality between us. My memory of him is 
without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life. In 
my heart I paid him the same glad homage that I paid 
Lowell and Holmes, and he did nothing to make me 
think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps 
very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is say- 
ing everything, for I have known but few great men, 

55 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

especially of those I met in early life, when I wished 
to lavish my admiration npon them, whom I have not 
the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a de- 
fect of the Puritan quality, which I have found in many 
New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or unwittingly, they 
propose themselves to you as an example, or if not quite 
this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether 
of potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign 
of unworthiness in you, they helplessly suffer you to 
gasp and perish ; they have good hearts, and they would 
probably come to your succor out of humanity, if they 
knew how, but they do not know how. IlaAvthorne had 
nothing of this about him ; he was no more tacitly than 
he was explicitly didactic. I thought him as thorough- 
ly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes had 
seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I 
had met the Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. 
He had just given the world the last of those incom- 
parable works which it was to have finished from his 
hand; the Marhle Faun had worthily followed, at a 
somewhat longer interval than usual, the Blithedalc 
Romance, and the House of Seven Gables, and the 
Scarlet Letter, and had perhaps carried his name higher 
than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody 
was reading it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite 
close, but yielding him that full honor and praise which 
a writer can hope for but once in his life. Nobody 
dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, 
sketches more or less faltering, though all with the di- 
vine touch in them, were further to enrich a legacy 
which in its kind is the finest the race has received from 
any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new 
Hawthorne's, but the illusion soon wears away, and then 
we perceive that they were not Hawthornes at all ; that 
he had some peculiar difference from them, which, by- 



' • :r ^ 




rrvcu ^;^^ 



NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 



MY FIEST VISIT TO XEW EXGLAND 

and-bv, we shall no doubt consent must be his difference 
from all men evermore. 

I am painfully aware that I have not summoned be- 
fore the reader the image of the man as it has always 
stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of shame for my 
failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as 
if it would be easy to do so ; but perhaps a spirit from 
the other world would be simple too, and yet would no 
more stand at parle, or consent to be sketched, than 
Ha^^thorne. In fact, he was always more or less merg- 
ing into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly 
to close over him; there was nothing uncanny in his 
presence, there was nothing even unwilling, but he had 
that apparitional quality of some great minds which 
kept Shakespeare largely imknown to those who thought 
themselves his intimates, and has at last left him a 
sort of doubt. There was nothing teasing or wilfully 
elusive in Ha^vthorne's impalpability, such as I after- 
wards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your 
touch, it was no fault of his ; it was because your touch 
was dull, and wanted the use of contact with such nat- 
ures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom 
without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none 
the less veridical for all that. 

XVI 

I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne 
wholly for the thoughts of him, or rather for that 
reverberation which continues in the young sensibili- 
ties after some important encoimter. It must have 
been the next morning that I went to find Thoreau, 
and I am dimly aware of making one or two failures 
to find him, if I ever really found him at all. 

He is an author who has fallen into that abey- 

57 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

ance, awaiting all authors, great or small, at some 
time or another; but I think that with him, at 
least in regard to his most important book, it can be 
only transitory. I have not read the story of his her- 
mitage beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I 
have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should 
think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than 
I thought it then. It is no solution of the problem; 
men are not going to answer the riddle of the painful 
earth by building themselves shanties and living upon 
beans and watching ant-fights ; but I do not believe Tol- 
stoy himself has more clearly shown the hollowness, 
the hopelessness, the imworthiness of the life of the 
world than Tlioreau did in that book. If it were newly 
written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than 
it had then, when to those who thought and felt seri- 
ously it seemed that if slavery could only be controlled, 
all things else would come right of themselves with us. 
Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been 
destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right 
with us; but it was in the order of Providence that 
chattel slavery should cease before industrial slavery, 
and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and lux- 
ury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then 
any prevision of the struggle now at hand, the seers 
averted their eyes, and strove only to cope with the less 
evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a vision of 
the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw 
himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and 
Virginia, reddened with war ; he aided and abetted the 
John Brown raid, I do not recall how much or in what 
sort ; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and 
actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more 
than his literature even, made me w4sh to see him and 
revere him; and I do not believe that I should have 

58 




HENRY DAVID THOKEAU 



1 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

found the veneration difficult, when at last I met him in 
his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present 
to my glowing expectation. He came into the room a 
quaint, stump figure of a man, whose effect of long 
trunk and short limbs was heightened by his fashionless 
trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, 
with tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity 
of j)rofile, which made me think at once of Don Quixote 
and of Cervantes ; but his nose failed to add that foot 
to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that shape will 
always give a man. He tried to place me geographical- 
ly after he had given me a chair not quite so far off as 
Ohio, though still across the whole room, for he sat 
against one wall, and I against the other ; but apparent- 
ly he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the 
effort, for he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my 
attempts to say something fit about John Brown and 
Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have 
not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless 
about both, and that what I said could not well have 
prompted an important response ; but I did my poor 
best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The 
truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete 
young person, and all forms of the abstract, the air- 
drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not 
remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of him- 
self at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, 
it was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man 
of m.y conception, but a sort of John Brown type, a 
John Browm ideal, a John Brown principle, which we 
were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, 
Orphic phrases) to cherish, and to nourish ourselves 
upon. 

It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, 
and T felt myself so scattered over the field of thought 

59 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

that I could hardly bring my forces together for retreat. 
I must have made some effort, vain and foolish enough, 
to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I 
came away it was with the feeling that there was 
very little more left of John Brown than there was 
of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, 
neither was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, 
his principle alone existed, and I did not know what to 
do with it. I am not blaming Thoreau ; his words were 
addressed to a far other understanding than mine, and 
it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I 
think, or I venture to hope, that I could profit better 
by them now ; but in this record I am trying honestly 
to report their effect with the sort of youth I was then. 

XVII 

Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the 
courage, after this experiment of Thoreau, to pre- 
sent the card Hawthorne had given me to Emerson. 
I must have gone to him at once, however, for I 
cannot make out any interval of time between my 
visit to the disciple and my visit to the master. I 
think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to 
me, for I have a vision of the fine old man standing 
tall on his threshold, with the card in his hand, and 
looking from it to me with a vague serenity, while I 
waited a moment on the door-step below him. He 
must then have been about sixty, but I remember 
nothing of age in his aspect, though I have called him 
an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely 
dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, 
chiselled to a delicate intelligence by the highest and 
noblest thinking that any man has done. There was a 
strange charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt then and 

60 




RALPH WALDO EMERSON 



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but 
shyer, but sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very 
sweetest I have ever beheld, and the contour of the 
mask and the line of the profile were in keeping with 
this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave 
and quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it 
either, but subtly, not unkindly arch, which again is 
not the word. 

It was his great fortune to have been mostly misun- 
derstood, and to have reached the dense intelligence of 
his fellow-men after a whole lifetime of perfectly simple 
and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the 
patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide 
his time. It would be hard to persuade people now 
that Emerson once represented to the popular mind all 
that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a cer- 
tain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incom- 
prehensible, the byword of the poor paragrapher. He 
had perhaps disabused the community somewhat by 
presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and 
talking face to face with men in terms which they could 
not refuse to find as clear as they were wise; he Avas 
more and more read, by certain persons, here and there ; 
but we are still so far behind him in the reach of his 
far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that 
twenty years before his death he was the most misun- 
derstood man in America. Yet in that twilight where 
he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the 
minds that could not conceive him were still aware of 
his greatness. I myself had not read much of him, but 
I knew the essays he was printing in the Atlantic, and 
I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many ; 
yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, be- 
yond and abovu my ken, a presence of force and beauty 
and wisdom, uncompanioned in our literature. He had 

.61 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part in 
the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth 
were told he was more to my young fervor because he 
had said that John Brown had made the gallows glori- 
ous like tlie cross, than because he had uttered all those 
truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years 
hence be leading the thought of the world. 

I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, 
but I am aware of sitting with him in his study or 
library, and of his presently speaking of Hawthorne, 
whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom 
he praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine 
qualities as a neighbor. '' But his last book," he added, 
reflectively, " is a mere mush," and I perceived that 
this great man was no better equipped to judge an art- 
istic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying- 
out upon the indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Ap- 
parently he had read it, as they had, for the story, but 
it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me then, that 
as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book 
must leave it where it found it. That is forever in- 
soluble, and it was rather with that than with his more 
or less shadowy people that the romancer was con- 
cerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to 
specific pieces of literature; he praised extravagantly, 
and in the wrong place, especially among the new 
things, and he failed to see the worth of much that was 
fine and precious beside the line of his fancy. 

He began to ask me about the West, and about some 
unknown man in Michigan, who had been sending him 
poems, and whom he seemed to think very promising, 
though he has not apparently kept his word to do great 
things. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my 
section very accurate or important, though it was kindly 
enough, and just enough as to what the West ought to 




EMEIISON S HOUSE AT CONCORD 



IIY FIEST VISIT TO NEW EKGLAND 

do in literature. He thought it a pity that a literary 
periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati 
should be appealing to the East for contributions, in- 
stead of relying upon the writers nearer home ; and he 
listened with what patience he could to my modest opin- 
ion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never 
was of those Westerners who believed that the West was 
kept out of literature by the jealousy of the East, and I 
tried to explain why we had not the men to write that 
magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan 
as one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and 
again I had to say that I had never heard of him. 

I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a no- 
tion that it did not commend me, but happily at this 
moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner, and he 
asked me to come with him. x^fter dinner we walked 
about in his " pleached garden " a little, and then we 
came again into his library, where I meant to linger 
only till I could fitly get away. He questioned me 
about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides 
Hawthorne I had met, and when I told him only 
Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of Mr. 
William Henry Channing. I have known them since, 
and felt their quality, which I have gladly owned a 
genuine and original poetry ; but I answered then truly 
that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms : cruel and 
spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying 
as I once did. 

" Whose criticisms ?" asked Emerson. 

" Poe's,'' I said again. 

" Oh,'' he cried out, after a moment, as if he had 
returned from a far search for my meaning, ^^ you mean 
the jingle-man r^ 

I do not know why this should have put me to such 
confusion, but if I had written the criticisms myself I 

63 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

do not think I could have been more abashed. Perhaps 
I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a character- 
ization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with ; 
though I do not agree with the world about him, my- 
self, in its admiration. At any rate, it made an end of 
me for the time, and I remained as if already absent, 
while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written 
in the Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none 
of my contributions, for he looked at them, in the bound 
volume of the magazine which he got down, with the 
effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely 
affixed my initials to each. He followed me to the door, 
still speaking of poetry, and as he took a kindly enough 
leave of me, he said one might very well give a pleas- 
ant hour to it now and then. 

A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give 
all time and all eternity to poetry, and I should by no 
means have wished to find pleasure in it ; I should have 
thought that a proof of inferior quality in the work ; I 
should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to 
pleasure. But if Emerson thought from the glance he 
gave my verses that I had better not lavish myself upon 
that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more of 
me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, 
no doubt he was right. I was only too painfully aware 
of my shortcoming, but I felt that it was shorter-coming 
than it need have been. I had somehow not prospered 
in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and 
I came away wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. 
I was not a forth-putting youth, and I could not blame 
myself for anything in my approaches that merited 
withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I 
must needs blame myself for something, I fell upon the 
fact that in my confused retreat from Emerson's pres- 
ence I had failed in a certain slight point of ceremony, 

64 



MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 

and I magnified this into an offence of capital im- 
portance. I went home to my hotel, and passed the 
afternoon in pure misery. I had moments of wild 
question when I debated whether it would be better to 
go back and own my error, or whether it would be better 
to write him a note, and try to set myself right in that 
way. But in the end I did neither, and I have since 
survived my mortal shame some forty years or 
more. But at the time it did not seem possible that I 
should live through the day with it, and I thought that 
I ought at least to go and confess it to Hawthorne, and 
let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid 
the kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. 
I did indeed walk down by the Wayside, in the cool of 
the evening, and there I saAv Hawthorne for the last 
time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his 
cottage, and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I 
had got on very w^ell with him, and I longed to go in, 
and tell him how ill I had got on with Emerson ; I be- 
lieved that though he cast me off, he would understand 
me, and would perhaps see some hope for me in another 
world, though there could be none in this. 

But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to 
any one but Fields, to whom I unpacked my heart when 
I got back to Boston, and he asked me about my ad- 
ventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a 
humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying 
back in his chair and laughing and laughing, till I 
thought he would roll out of it. He perfectly con- 
ceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that 
I could get only through sympathy with him. But I 
thought it a favorable moment to propose myself as the 
assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which I had 
the belief I could very well become, with advantage to 
myself if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so 

65 



LiTERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAII^TANCE 

too; lie said that if the place had not just been filled, 
I should certainly have had it ; and it was to his recol- 
lection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose 
I may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some 
four years later. He was charmingly kind ; he entered 
with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic 
life, which had been full of changes and chances al- 
ready. But when I said very seriously that now I was 
tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in 
something, he asked, with dancing eyes, 

" Why, how old are you V^ 

" I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laugh- 
ing fit took him again. 

" Well,'- he said, " you begin young, out there !" 

In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so 
very young, but perhaps it was ; and if any one were 
to say that I had been portraying here a youth whose 
aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was 
morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably 
conscious, who had met with incredible kindness, and 
had suffered no more than was good for him, though he 
might not have merited his pain any more than his joy, 
I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not 
at all sure that I was not just that kind of youth when 
I paid my first visit to New England. 



IPart Sccon& 

FIKST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK 

TT was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an 
-^ August morning of I860, which was probably of 
the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I 
used not to mind the weather much in those days ; it 
was hot or it was cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it 
was not my affair; and I suppose that I sweltered 
about the strange city, with no sense of anything very 
personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What 
I remember is being high up in a hotel long since laid 
low, listening in the summer dark, after the long day 
was done, to the ]^iagara roar of the omnibuses whose 
tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all 
the miles of its length. At that hour the other city 
noises were stilled, or lost in this vaster volume of 
sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had 
a solemnity which the modern comer to N'ew York 
will hardly imagine, for that tide of omnibuses has long 
since ebbed away, and has left the air to the strident 
discords of the elevated trains and the irregular 
alarum of the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such 
harmonious thunder as rose from the procession of 
those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was 
a sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose 
I slept off to it, and woke to it in the morning refreshed 
and strengthened to explore the literary situation in 
the metropolis. 

67 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 



N'ot that I think I left this to the second day. Very 
probably I lost no time in going to the office of the 
Saturday Press, as soon as I had my breakfast after 
arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating 
the earliest of the bohemians, whose gay theory of 
life obliged them to a good many hardships in lying 
down early in the morning, and rising up late in the 
day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company 
dnring the first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors 
and contributors actually began to come in. I would 
not be very specific about them if I could, for since 
that Boliemia has faded from the map of the republic 
of letters, it has grown more and more difficult to trace 
its citizenship to any certain writer. There are some 
living wlio knew the bohemians and even loved them, 
but there are increasingly few who were of them, even 
in the fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. 
It was in fact but a sickly colony, transplanted from 
the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking 
root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony 
of ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any 
deep root anywhere. What these ideas, these theories, 
were in art and in life, it would not be very easy to 
say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent 
expression, not to say explosion, against all existing 
forms of respectability. If respectability was your 
Mte noire, then you were a bohemian ; and if you w^ere 
in the habit of rendering yourself in prose, then you 
necessarily sliredded your prose into very fine para- 
graphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or 
even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed 
till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who 

68 




CHARLES P. BROWNE (" ARTEMUS WARD") 



MY IMPKESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK 

thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style ; 
and I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic 
moments of Victor Hugo by the editor of the Press. 
He brought it back with him when he came home from 
one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the 
French accent rather than the French language ; I long 
desired to write in that fashion myself, but I had not 
the courage. 

This editor was a man of such open and avowed 
cynicism that he may have been, for all I know, a kind- 
ly optimist at heart; some say, however, that he had 
really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only 
know that his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such 
a sort that if he was half as bad, he would have 
been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room 
saying what lurid things he would directly do if any 
one accused him of respectability, so that he might dis- 
abuse the minds of all witnesses. There were four or 
five of his assistants and contributors listening to the 
dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great 
innocence as mine, but I do not know whether they 
found it the sorry farce that I did. They probably 
felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, 
in spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at 
the same time for the effect of his words with one who 
was confessedly fresh from Boston, and was full of 
delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, 
with him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that 
if you passed down Washington Street, half a dozen 
men in the crowd would know you were Holmes, or 
Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in 
Broadway no one would know who you were, or care to 
the measure of his smallest blasphemy. I have since 
heard this more than once urged as a signal advantage 
of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not 

69 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

sure, jet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity 
probably has his mind quite as much upon himself 
as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise I can- 
not think tliat the sense of neighborhood is such a 
bad thing for the artist in any sort. It involves the 
sense of responsibility, which cannot be too constant 
or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this may 
be the secret of Boston. 

II 

It would not be easy to say just why the bohemian 
group represented New York literature to my imagi- 
nation, for I certainly associated other names with its 
best work, but perhaps it was because I had written 
for the Saturday Press myself, and had my pride iu 
it, and perhaps it w^as because that paper really em- 
bodied the new literary life of the city. It was clever, 
and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. 
It attacked all literary shams but its owm, and it made 
itself felt and feared. The young writers throughout 
the country were ambitious to be seen in it, and they 
gave their best to it ; they gave literally, for the Satur- 
day Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, 
vaguer even than promises. It is not too much to say 
that it was very nearly as well for one to be accepted 
by the P?^ess as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and for 
the time there was no other literary comparison. To 
be in it was to be in the company of Fitz James 
O'Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Sted- 
man, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveli- 
est in verse at that day in New York. It w^as a power, 
and although it is true that, as Henry Giles said of it, 
'' Man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone," the Press 
was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then ; 
I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not 

70 




ED.MU>sD CLAUKInCE STEDMAN 



MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK 

like snapping-turtle so mncli as I once did, and I have 
grown nicer in my taste, and want my snapping-turtle 
of the very best. What is certain is that I went to 
the office of the Saturday Press in New Y'ork with 
much the same sort of feeling I had in going to the 
office of the Atlantic Mojithly in Boston, but I came 
away with a very different feeling. I had found there 
a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness 
against respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly 
becoming my second country, I could not join in the 
scorn thought of her and said of her by the bohemians. 
I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the liter- 
ary pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he 
had experienced in visiting other shrines; but I found 
no harm in that, for I knew just how much to be shock- 
ed, and I thought I knew better how to value certain 
things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief ask- 
ed me how I got on with Hawthorne, and I began to 
say that he was very shy and I was rather shy, and 
the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon 
me with " Oh, a couple of shysters !" and the rest 
laughed, I was abashed all they could have wished, 
and was not restored to myself till one of them said 
that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; 
then I began to hope again that men who took them- 
selves so seriously as that need not be taken very seri- 
ously by me. 

In fact I had heard things almost as desperately 
cynical in other newspaper offices before that, and I 
could not see what was so distinctively bohemian in 
these anime prave, these souls so baleful by their own 
showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state 
that you could well imagine from one encounter, and 
since my stay in New York was to be very short, I lost 
no time in acquainting mvself further with it. That 

h 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far 
up Broadway, where I was given to know that the bo- 
hemian nights were smoked and quaffed away. It was 
said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia 
sometimes came to Pf aff's : a young girl of a sprightly 
gift in letters, whose name or pseudonym had made 
itself pretty well known at that day, and Avhose fate, 
pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in 
the history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia 
from the bite of her dog, on a railroad train ; and made 
a long journey home in the paroxysms of that agoniz- 
ing disease, which ended in her death after she reached 
New York. But this was after her reign had ended, 
and no such black shadow was cast forward upon 
Pfaff's, whose name often figured in the verse and the 
epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the Saturday 
Press. 1 felt that as a contributor and at least a bre- 
vet bohemian I ought not to go home without visiting 
the famous place, and witnessing if I could not share 
the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer 
nor smoked, my part in the carousal was limited to a 
German pancake, which I found they had very good 
at Pfaff's, and to listening to the whirling words of 
my commensals, at the long board spread for the bo- 
hemians in a cavernous space under the pavement. 
There were writers for the Saturday Press and for 
Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), 
and some of the artists who drew for the illustrated 
periodicals. Nothing of their talk remains with me, 
but the impression remains that it was not so good talk 
as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, 
which went but slowly for an orgy, we were joined by 
some belated bohemians whom the others made a great 
clamor over; I was given to understand they were just 
recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were 

72 



MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK 

still damp from the wet towels used to restore them, 
and their eyes were very frenzied. I was presented to 
these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy 
of their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at 
the table, and ate of the supper with an appetite that 
seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for worse things 
till eleven o'clock, and then I rose and took my leave of 
a literary condition that had distinctly disappointed 
me. I do not say that it may not have been wickeder 
and wittier than I found it; I only report what I saw 
and heard in bohemia on my first visit to New Y^ork, 
and I know that my acquaintance with it was not ex- 
haustive. When I came the next year the Saturday 
Press was no more, and the editor and his contributors 
had no longer a common centre. The best of the young 
fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant 
exchange of letters which we had afterwards, that he 
thought the pose a vain and unprofitable one; and 
when the Press was revived, after the war, it was with- 
out any of the old bohemian characteristics except 
that of not paying for material. It could not last long 
upon these terms, and again it passed away, and still 
waits its second palingenesis. 

The editor passed away too, not long after, and the 
thing that he had inspired altogether ceased to be. He 
was a man of a certain sardonic power, and used it 
rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more ap- 
parent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowl- 
edge of him he was much milder than when I first knew 
him, and I have the feeling that he too came to own 
before he died that man cannot live bj^ snapping-turtle 
alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and 
befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he 
would have been the last to let you call generous. The 
chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the 

73 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause 
with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man 
could have. It was not till long afterwards that his 
English admirers hegan to discover him, and to make 
his countrymen some noisy reproaches for ignoring 
him; they were wholly in the dark concerning him 
when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, 
and the young men whom the Press gathered ahout it, 
made him their cult. No doubt he Avas more valued 
because he was so offensive in some ways than he would 
have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it 
remains a fact that they celebrated him quite as much 
as was good for them. He was often at Pfaff's with 
them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact 
of my experience. I did not know he was there till T 
was on my way out, for he did not sit at the table under 
the pavement, but at the head of one fartlier into the 
room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow stopped 
me and named me to him, and I remember how he 
leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand 
to me, as if he were going to give it me for good and 
all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair 
upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gen- 
tle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed 
to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though 
we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was 
summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty 
fist upon my hand. I doubt if he had any notion who 
or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young poet 
of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered 
seeing my name printed after some very Heinesque 
verses in the Press. 1 did not meet him again for 
twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him 
when he was reading the proofs of his poems in Bos- 
ton. Some years later I saw him for the last time, 

71 




THE MKliTING WITH WHITMAN 



MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK 

one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that city, when 
he came down from the platform to speak with some 
hand-shaking friends who gathered about him. Then 
and always he gave me the sense of a sweet and true 
soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will 
not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront 
of his book a passage from a private letter of Emer- 
son's, though I believe he would not have seen such a 
thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in 
another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him 
no less than the dignity is something that I will no 
more try to reconcile with Avhat denies it in his page; 
but such things we may well leave to the adjustment 
of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make 
sure only of the greatest benignity in the presence of 
the man. The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was 
the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into 
the terms of social encounter, was an address of singu- 
lar quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endear- 
ing friendliness. 

As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think 
it so valuable in effect as in intention. He was a lib- 
erating force, a very " imperial anarch " in literature ; 
but liberty is never anything but a means, and what 
Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what 
must be called his verse. I like his prose, if there is a 
difference, much better; there he is of a genial and 
comforting quality, very rich and cordial, such as I felt 
him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems 
to me not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one's 
emotions; yet I would not misprize it, and I am glad 
to own that I have had moments of great pleasure in it. 
Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I 
cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him 
when he said that he made vou a partner of the enter- 

75 



LITEEAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

prise, for that is precisely what he does, and that is 
what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or 
dislike the partnership. It is still something neigh- 
borly, brotherly, fatherly, and so I felt him to be when 
the benign old man looked on me and spoke to me. 

Ill 

That night at Pfaff's must have been the last of the 
bohemians for me, and it was the last of New York 
authorship too, for the time. I do not know why I 
should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I 
knew so much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may 
not have had the courage, or I may have heard that he 
was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out of 
the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him 
either. The bohemians were the beginning and the 
end of the story for me, and to tell the truth I did not 
like the story. I remember that as I sat at that table 
under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened 
to the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of 
the dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, the 
supi)er at the Autocrat's, and felt that I had fallen very 
far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time 
to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good 
while afterwards, that a person who had seen the men 
and had the things said before him that I had in Boston, 
could not keep himself too carefully in cotton ; and this 
was what I did all the following winter, though of 
course it was a secret between me and me. I dare say 
it was not the worst thing I could have done, in some 
respects. 

My sojourn in N"ew Y^ork could not have been very 
long, and the rest of it was mainly given to viewing the 
monuments of the citv from the windows of omnibuses 

76 




WILLIAM ALLEN BUTLER 



MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK 

and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so 
simple then that there were perhaps only a half-dozen 
cities that had horse-cars in them, and I travelled in 
those conveyances at N^ew York with an unfaded zest, 
even after my journeys hack and forth between Boston 
and Cambridge. I have not the least notion where I 
went or what I saw, bnt I suppose that it was up and 
down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open 
to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by 
the elevated roads, and that I found them very statelj^ 
and handsome. Indeed, New York was really hand- 
somer then than it is now, when it has so many more 
pieces of beautiful architecture, for at that day the sky- 
scrapers were not yet, and there was a fine regularity 
in the streets that these brute bulks have robbed of all 
shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty, but 
there was infinitely more comfort. The long succes- 
sion of cross streets was yet mostly secure from busi- 
ness, after you passed Clinton Place; commerce was 
just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and 
Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, 
whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brown- 
stone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried hard to imag- 
ine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had 
given me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of 
The Potiphar Papers had spread broadcast through 
a community shocked by the excesses of our best soci- 
ety ; it was not half so bad then as the best now, proba- 
bly. But I do not think I made very much of it, per- 
haps because most of the people who ought to have been 
in those fine mansions were away at the sea-side and 
the mountains. 

The mountains I had seen on my way down from 
Canada, but the sea-side not, and it would never do to 
go home without visiting some famous summer resort. 

77 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I muot 
have heard of it as then the most fashionable ; and one 
afternoon I took the boat for that place. By this means 
I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time, but I saw 
a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it 
blew away all the camp-stools of the forward prome- 
nade ; it was very exciting, and I long meant to use in 
literature the black wall of cloud that settled on the 
water before us like a sort of portable midnight ; I now 
throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never 
would come in anywhere. I stayed all night at Long 
Branch, and I had a bath the next morning before break- 
fast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep 
me against the undertow. In this rite I had the com- 
pany of a young New-Yorker, whom I had met on the 
boat coming down, and was of the light, hopeful, 
adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the 
city, and which has always attracted me. He told me 
much about his life, and how he lived, and what it cost 
him to live. He had a large room at a fashionable 
boarding-house, and he paid fourteen dollars a week. 
In Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and 
paid three and a half, and I thought it a good deal. But 
those were the days before the war, when America was 
the cheapest country in the Avorld, and the West was 
incredibly inexpensive. 

After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion 
and gayety, I went back to N'ew York, and took the boat 
for Albany on my way home. L noted that I had no 
longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature 
which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I 
said to myself that this was from having a mind so 
crowded with experiences and impressions that it could 
receive no more; and I really suppose that if the hap- 
piest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I 

78 



MY IMPKESSIOKS OF LITEKABY NEW YORK 

should scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a 
figure to fit it to. I was very glad to get back to my dear 
little city in the West (I found it seething in an August 
sun that was hot enough to have calcined the limestone 
State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of. 

IV 

I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them 
by refusing their invitations, and giving myself wholly 
to literature, during the early part of the winter that 
followed ; and I did not realize my error till the invita- 
' * ns ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken 
iitellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an un- 
grateful Muse did little in return for the sacrifices I 
made her, and the things I now wrote were not liked by 
the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste is not 
always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, 
and I am not saying the editors were wrong in my case. 
There were then such a very few places where you could 
market your work: the Atlantic in Boston and Harper's 
in I^ew York were the magazines that paid, though the 
Independent newspaper bought literary material; the 
Saturday Press printed it without buying, and so did 
the old Knickerbocker Magazine^ though there was pe- 
cuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much 
that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at 
last sent it to the Atlantic, which had published five 
poems for me the year before. After some weeks, or it 
may have been months, I got it back with a note saying 
that the editors had the less regret in returning it be- 
cause they saw that in the May number of the Knicker- 
bocker the first chapter of the story had appeared. Then 
I remembered that, years before, I had sent this chapter 
to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and 

79 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

afterwards had continued the story from it. I had 
never heard of its acceptance, and supposed of course 
that it was rejected; but on my second visit to New 
York I called at the Knicherhocher office, and a new 
editor, of those that the magazine was always having 
in the days of its failing fortunes, told me that he had 
found my sketch in rummaging about in a barrel of his 
predecessors' manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed 
it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to 
me for that sketch, and might he send the money to me ? 
I said that he might, though I do not see, to this day, 
why he did not give it me on the spot ; and he made a 
very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really 
like Dick Swiveller), and promised I should have it 
that night; but I sailed the next day for Liverpool 
without it. I sailed without the money for some verses 
that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected 
that, for the editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had 
frankly told me in taking my address that ducats were 
few at that moment with Vanity Fair. 

I was then on my way to be consul at Venice, where 
I spent the next four years in a vigilance for Confed- 
erate privateers which none of them ever surprised. I 
had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped 
to steep myself yet longer in German poetry, but when 
my appointment came, I found it was for Rome. I was 
very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the 
office was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to 
Washington and find out how much the fees amounted 
to. People in Columbus who had been abroad said that 
on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a 
prince, but I doubted this ; and when I learned at the 
State Department that the fees of the Roman consulate 
came to only three hundred, I perceived that I could not 
live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The 

80 



MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK 

kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the Presi- 
dent's secretaries, Mr. John l^icolay and Mr. John Hay, 
were interested in my appointment, and he advised my 
going over to the White House and seeing them. I lost 
no time in doing that, and I learned that as young West- 
ern men they were interested in me because I was a 
young Western man who had done something in litera- 
ture, and they were willing to help me for that reason, 
and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my 
going to Venice; the salary was then seven hundred 
and fifty, but they thought they could get it put up to 
a thousand. In the end they got it put up to fifteen 
hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not 
live like a prince on that income, I lived a good deal 
more like a prince than I could have done at Rome on 
a fifth of it. 

If the appointment was not present fortune, it was 
the beginning of the best luck I have had in the world, 
and I am glad to owe it all to those friends of my verse, 
who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They 
were then beginning very early careers of distinction 
which have not been wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could 
have been about twenty-five, and Mr. Hay nineteen or 
twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity 
opening to them in being so constantly near the man 
whose life they have written, and with whose fame they 
have imperishably interwrought their names. I re- 
member the sobered dignity of the one, and the humor- 
ous gayety of the other, and how we had some young 
men's joking and laughing together, in the anteroom 
where they received me, with the great soul entering 
upon its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me 
if I had ever seen the President, and I said that I had 
seen him at Columbus, the year before ; but I could not 
say how much I should like to see him again, and thank 
F 81 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, 
except such as the slight campaign biography I had 
written conld be thought to have given me. That day 
or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the corri- 
dor without, and he looked at the space I was part of 
with his ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing 
that I was the indistinguishable person in whose '^in- 
tegrity and abilities he had reposed such special confi- 
dence " as to have appointed him consul for Venice and 
the ports of the Lombardo- Venetian Kingdom, though 
he might have recognized the terras of my commission 
if I had reminded him of them. I faltered a moment 
in my longing to address him, and then I decided that 
every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to 
shake his hand, did him a kindness ; and I wish I could 
be as sure of the wisdom of all my past behavior as I 
am of that piece of it. He walked up to the water- 
cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full 
goblet from it, which he poured down his throat with a 
backward tilt of his head, and then went wearily within 
doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always re- 
mained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I 
would rather have seen Lincoln in that unconscious 
moment than on some statelier occasion. 



iVi 

I went home to Ohio, and sent on the bond I was to 
file in the Treasury Department; but it was mislaid 
there, and to prevent another chance of that kind I car- 
ried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit 
that I met the generous young Irishman William D. 
O'Connor, at the house of my friend Piatt, and heard 
his ardent talk. He was one of the promising men of 
that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in 

82 




-J^ 




MY iMPRESSiOKS OF LITERAKY KEW YORK 

(he heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my 
fancy; and I believe he wrote poems too. He had not 
yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman's champions 
outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already 
espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shake- 
speare, then newly exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's 
name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum. He 
used to speak of the reputed dramatist as ^^ the fat 
peasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque 
of speech in a measure that consoled, if it did not con- 
vince. The great war was then full upon us, and when 
in the silences of our literary talk its awful breath was 
lieard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we 
gathered round the first fires of autumn, O'Connor 
would lift his beautiful head with a fine effect of proph- 
ecy, and say, '^ Friends, I feel a sense of victory in the 
air." He was not wrong; only the victory was for the 
other side. 

Who beside O'Connor shared in these saddened sym- 
posiums I cannot tell now; but probably other young 
journalists and office-holders, intending litterateurs, 
since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the 
young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome 
edition of Leaves of Grass, and then failed promptly 
if not consequently. But I had already met, in my first 
sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given 
hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see 
and proud to know. Mr. Stedman and I were talking 
over that meeting the other day, and I can be surer than 
I might have been without his memory, that I found 
him at a friend's house, where he was nursing himself 
for some slight sickness, and that I sat by his bed while 
our souls launched together into the joyful realms of 
hope and praise. In him I found the quality of Bos- 
ton, the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere 

83 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

pose of the literary life ; and tlie world knows without 
my telling how true he has been to his ideal of it. 
His earthly mission then was to write letters from 
Washington for the New York Worlds which started in 
life as a good young evening paper, with a decided reli- 
gious tone, so that the Saturday Press could call it the 
Night-hlooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wTote 
for its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a 
Washington correspondent had an authority which is 
wanting to the function in these days of perfected tele- 
graphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the 
JStock Exchange whose possession has justified his re- 
course to business, and has helped him to mean some- 
thing more single in literature than many more singly 
devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that 
with another eager young author in certain middle 
years w^hen we were chafing in editorial harness, and we 
always decided that Stedman had the best of it in being 
able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature 
that he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust un- 
spoiled by kindred savors. But no man shapes his own 
life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been all the 
time envying us our tripods from his high place in the 
Stock Exchange. Wliat is certain is that he has come 
to stand for literature and to embody New York in it 
as no one else does. In a community which seems never 
to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept 
the faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant 
courage. Scholar and poet at once, he has spoken to 
his generation with authority which we can forget only 
in the cliarm which makes us forget everything else. 

But his fame was still before him when we met, 
and I could bring to him an admiration for work 
which had not yet made itself known to so many, but 
any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had 

84 




MRS. R. H. STODDARD 



MY IMPKESSIONS OF LITEKARY NEW YORK 

done, and each said how much he liked certain things 
of the other's ; I even seized mj advantage of his help- 
lessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in my 
pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the 
reader will not think it an unfair digression, I will tell 
here what became of that poem, for I think its varied 
fortunes were amusing, and I hope my o^vn sufferings 
and final triumph with it will not be without encourage- 
ment to the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem 
called, with no prophetic sense of fitness, 'Torlorn,''and 
I tried it first with the Atlantic Monthly, which would 
not have it. Then I offered it in person to a former 
editor of this Magazine, but he could not see his ad- 
vantage in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with 
me. From that point I sent it to all the English maga- 
zines as steadily as the post could carry it away and 
bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I 
took it to London with me, where a friend who knew 
Lewes, then just beginning with the Fortniglitly Re- 
view, sent it to him for me. It was promptly returned, 
with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full 
of a poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the 
Fortniglitly. Then I heard that a certain Mr. Lucas 
was about to start a magazine, and I offered the poem 
to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to 
America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as 
usual, when the news of Mr. Lucas's death came. I will 
not poorly joke an effect from my poem in the fact ; but 
the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the 
office of the Nation newspaper, and after I left this 
place to be Mr. Fields's assistant on the Atlantic, I sent 
my poem to the Nation, where it was printed at last. 
In such scant measure as my verses have pleased it has 
found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its 
misfortunes endeared it to its author. 

85 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

But all this is rather far away from my first meeting 
with Stedman in Washington. Of course I liked him, 
and I thought him very handsome and fine, with a full 
beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and with 
poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, 
when I saw him afoot, I found him of a worldly splen- 
dor in dress, and envied him, as much as I could envy 
him anything, the Xew York tailor whose art had 
clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, hut with a 
/* difference. He had a worldly dash along with his su- 
permundane gifts, which took me almost as much, and 
all the more because I could see that he valued himself 
nothing upon it. He was all for literature, and for 
literary men as the superiors of every one. I must 
have opened my heart to him a good deal, for when I 
told him how the newspaper I had written for from 
Canada and New England had ceased to print my let- 
ters, he said, " Think of a man like sitting in 

judgment on a man like you!'' I thought of it, and was 
avenged if not comforted ; and at any rate I liked Sted- 
man's standing up so stiffly for the honor of a craft 
^ that is rather too limp in some of its votaries. 

I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stod- 
dards, whom I met in New York just before I sailed, 
and who were then in the glow of their early fame as 
poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they 
were very, very good to me. Stoddard went with me 
to Franklin Square, and gave the sanction of his pres- 
ence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But 
what I relished most was the long talks I had with them 
both about authorship in all its phases, and the ex- 
change of delight in this poem and that, this novel and 
that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some wholly 
irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark 
whatever. Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweet- 

86 




R. H. STODDARD 



MY IMPKESSIONS OF LITEKAKY NEW YOEK 

ness of personal affection in it, from the lyrics and tlie 
odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and Mrs. 
Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special 
quality felt in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In 
both it seems to me that she has failed of the recogni- 
tion Avhich her work merits. Her tales and novels have 
in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for 
the palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. 
It is a peculiar fate, and would form the scheme of a 
pretty study in the history of literature. But in what- 
ever she did she left the stamp of a talent like no other, 
and of a personality disdainful of literary environ- 
ment. In a time when most of us had to write like 
Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Browning, she never would 
write like any one but herself. 

I remember very well the lodging over a corner of 
Fourth Avenue and some downtown street where I vis- 
ited these winning and gifted people, and tasted the 
pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their 
good-will toward all literature, v/hich certainly did not 
leave me out. We sat before their grate in the chill of 
the last October days, and they set each other on to one 
wild flight of wit after another, and again I bathed my 
delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for 
the time at least no 

" — rumor of oppression or defeat, 
Of unsuccessful or successful war," 

could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they 
were frankly not of that Bohemia which I disliked so 
much, and thought it of no promise or validity; and 
because I was fond of their poetry and found them in 
it. I liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. 
He had then, and for long after, a place in the Custom- 
house, but he was no more of that than Lamb was of 

87 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

India House. He belonged to that better world where 
there is no interest but letters, and which was as much 
like heaven for me as anything I could think of. 

The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves 
when I came back to sail from New York, early in No- 
vember. Mixed up with the cordial pleasure of them in 
my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors, and 
the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, 
then as for long afterwards the squalidest in the world. 
The last night I saw my friends they told me of the 
tragedy which had just happened at the camp in the 
City Hall Park. Eitz James O'Brien, the brilliant, 
young Irishman who had dazzled us with his story of 
" The Diamond Lens," and frozen our blood with his 
ingenious tale of a ghost — " What was It ?" — a ghost 
that could be felt and heard, but not seen — had enlisted 
for the war, and risen to be an officer with the swift 
process of the first days of it. In that camp he had 
just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of 
discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. 
He was acquitted, however, and it is known how he 
afterwards died of lockjaw from a wound received in 
battle. 

VI 

Before this last visit in New York there was a second 
visit to Boston, which I need not dwell upon, because it 
was chiefly a revival of the impressions of the first. 
Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again the 
Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, 
beside the study fire where I was so often to sit with him 
in coming years. At dinner (which we had at two 
o'clock) the talk turned upon my appointment, and he 
said of me to his wife : ^' Think of his having got Still- 
man's place ! We ought to put poison in his wine," and 

88 



MY IMPKESSIONS OF LITEKARY NEW YORK 

he told me of the wish the painter had to go to Venice 
and follow up Riiskin's work there in a book of his own. 
But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not 
pretend that I had any personal regret for my good 
fortune. 

The place was given me perhaps because I had not 
nearly so many other gifts as he who lost it, and who 
Avas at once artist, critic, journalist, traveller, and emi- 
nently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the 
powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he 
forgave me, though I do not know whether he forgave 
the powers. We walked far and long over the Cam- 
pagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind 
in talk which came out richest and fullest in the pres- 
ence of the wild nature which he loved and knew so 
much better than most other men. I think that the book 
he would have written about Venice is forever to be re- 
gretted, and I do not at all console myself for its loss 
with the book I have written myself. 

At Lowell's table that day they spoke of what sort of 
winter I should find in Venice, and he inclined to the 
belief that I should want a fire there. On his study 
hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to 
it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We 
looked through one of the windows at the rain, and he 
said he could remember standing and looking out of 
that w^indow at such a storm when he was a child ; for 
he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming 
back to it. He died in it, at last. 

In a lifting of the rain he walked with me doAvn to 
the village, as he always called the denser part of the 
toAvn about Harvard Square, and saw me aboard a 
horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two 
charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak 
Italian, and to think well of women. He said that our 

89 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

race spoke its o^vti tongue with its teeth shut, and so 
failed to master the languages that wanted freer utter- 
ance. As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, 
but a good woman was the best thing in the world, and 
a man was always the better for honoring women. 



part trbir2> 
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

DURIxS'G the four years of my life in Venice the 
literary intention was present with me at all 
times and in all places. I wrote many things in verse, 
Avhich I sent to the magazines in every part of the Eng- 
lish-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to 
me, except in three instances only, when they were kept 
by the editors who finally printed them. One of these 
pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another 
in Harper s Magazine; the third was got into the ^ew 
York Ledger through the kindness of Doctor Edward 
Everett Hale, who used I know not what mighty magic 
to that end. I had not yet met him ; but he interested 
himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His 
brother, Charles Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, 
whom I saw almost every moment of the two visits he 
paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after copy- 
ing it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be 
read. He was not quite of that literary Boston which 
I so fondly remembered my glimpses of ; he was rather 
of a journalistic and literary Boston which I had never 
known ; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been 
in LowelFs classes at Harvard ; he had often met Long- 
fellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of 
course; and he let me talk of my idols to my heart's 
content. I think he must have been amused by my rapt- 
ures ; most people would have been ; but he was kind 

91 



LITERAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

and patient, and lie listened to me with a sweet intelli- 
gence Avhicli I shall always gratefully remember. He 
died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly un- 
fulfilled ; but none who knew him could fail to imagine 
them, or to love him for what he was. 



Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing 
but defeats in the sort of literature which I supposed 
was to be my calling, and the defeats threw me upon 
prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then 
another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write 
those studies of Venetian life which afterwards became 
a book, and which' I contributed as letters to the Boston 
Advertiser, after vainly offering them to more aesthetic 
periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was 
a very smiling time for any literary endeavorer at 
home in the life-and-death civil war then waging. 
Some few young men arose who made themselves 
heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but 
most of these were hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore 
Winthrop, who began to speak, as it were, from his 
soldier's grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest 
recognition by the public, and so many were his pos- 
thumous works, was chief of these; but there were 
others whom the present readers must make greater 
effort to remember. Forceythe Willson,who wrote The 
Old Sergeant, became known for the rare quality 
of his poetry; and now and then there came a poem 
from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great 
new series of the Biglow Papers gathered volume with 
the force they had from the beginning. The Autocrat 
was often in the pages of the Atlantic, where one often 
found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name 

92 




■f 




EOUNDABOUT TO BOSTOK 

now faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing 
some of the most beautiful verse of the war, and 
Bro^\aiell was sounding his battle lyrics like so many 
trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war 
was yet all to come. Whatever was done in any kind 
had some hint of the war in it, inevitably; though in 
the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about his 
great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he 
has told in the noble sonnets which register the mood 
of his undertaking. 

At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary 
recognition I was in direct relations with one of our 
greatest literary men, who was again of that literary 
Boston which mainly represented American literature 
to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was 
the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time 
this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. 
He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration 
wliich followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name 
it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. 
Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit 
of a man who had given lustre to our name by his 
work, and who was an ardent patriot as well as accom- 
plished scholar. He visited Venice during my first 
year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, 
and I remember with what instant security, not to say 
severity, he rebuked my scarcely whispered misgivings 
of the end, when I ventured to ask him what he thought 
it would be. Austria had never recognized the Se- 
cessionists as belligerents, and in the complications 
with Trance and England there was little for our min- 
ister but to share the home indignation at the sympathy 
of those powers with the South. In Motley this was 
heightened by that feeling of astonishment, of wound- 
ed faith, which all Americans with English friend- 

93 



LITEEAKY FEIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

ships experienced in those days, and which he, whose 
English friendships were many, experienced in pecu- 
liar degree. 

I drifted abont with him in his gondola, and refresh- 
ed myself, long a-hungered for snch talk, with his talk 
of literary life in London. Through some acquain- 
tance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to 
him in getting documents copied for him in the Vene- 
tian Archives, especially the Ttelations of the Vene- 
tian Ambassadors at different courts during the period 
and events he was studying. All such papers passed 
through my hands in transmission to the historian, 
though now I do not quite know why they need have 
done so; but perhaps he was willing to give me the 
pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the 
enterprise. My recollection of him is of courtesy to a 
far younger man unqualified by patronage, and of a 
presence of singular dignity and grace. lie was one 
of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, 
a fine blond beard of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, 
straight and fine. He was altogether a figure of w^orld- 
ly splendor ; and I had reason to know that he did not 
let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristo- 
cratic court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic 
costume, when some of our ministers were trying to 
make their office do its full effect upon all occasions in 
" the dress of an American gentleman. '^ The morn- 
ing after his arrival Mr. ^lotley came to me with a 
handful of newspapers which, according to the Aus- 
trian custom at that day, had been opened in the Vene- 
tian post-office. lie wished me to protest against this 
on his behalf as an infringement of his diplomatic 
extra-territoriality, and I proposed to go at once to the 
director of the post : I had myself suffered in the same 
way, and though I knew that a mere consul was help- 

94 




JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY 



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

less, I was willing to see the double-headed eagle trod- 
den under foot by a Minister Plenipotentiary. Mr. 
Motley said that he would go with me, and we put off in 
his gondola to the post-office. The dire^^tor received us 
with the utmost deference. He admitted the irregu- 
larity which the minister complained of, and declared 
that he had no choice but to open every foreign news- 
paper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, how- 
ever, that if the minister made his appeal to the Lieu- 
tenant-Governor of Venice, Count Toggenburg w^ould 
no doubt instantly order the exemption of his news- 
papers from the general rule. 

Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure 
of calling upon the Lieutenant-Governor, and ^^ How 
fortunate," he added, when we were got back into the 
gondola, " that I should have happened to bring my 
court dress with me V I did not see the encounter 
of the high contending powers, but I know that it end- 
ed in a complete victory for our minister. ^ 

I had no further active relations of an official kind 
with Mr. Motley, except in the case of a naturalized 
American citizen, whose property was slowly but sure- 
ly wasting aw^ay in the keeping of the Venetian courts. 
An order had at last been given for the surrender of 
the remnant to the owner; but the Lombardo- Venetian 
authorities insisted that this should be done through 
the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley 
held as firmly that it must be done through the United 
States Consul at Venice. I could only report to him 
from time to time the unyielding attitude of the Civil 
Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, " to act 
officiously, not officially, in the matter,'' and the hap- 
less claimant got what was left of his estate. 

I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Bos- 
ton, but it was only for a moment, just before his ap- 

95 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

pointment to England, where he was made to suffer for 
Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice 
cro^vned the injuries his country had done a most faith- 
ful patriot and high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as 
a historian once filled the ear of the English-speaking 
world. His books seemed to have been written in a 
spirit already no longer modern ; and I did not find the 
greatest of them so moving as I expected when I came 
to it with all the ardor of my admiration for the his- 
torian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his 
worshipper^s own showing, scarcely level with the 
popular movement which he did not so much direct as 
follow ; but it is a good deal for a prince to be able even 
to follow his people ; and it cannot be said that Motley 
does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch 
people, though he may see the Prince of Orange too 
large. The study of their character made at least a 
theoretical ^mocrat of a scholar whose instincts were 
not perhaps democratic, and his sympathy \nth that 
brave little republic between the dikes strengthened him 
in his fealty to the great commonwealth between the 
oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any political 
tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; 
but when I met him at Venice he was in the glow of a 
generous pride in our war as a war against slavery. 
He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted, 
single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms 
that an original abolitionist might have used, at a time 
when original abolitionists were not so many as they 
have since become. 

Eor the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be 
represented at Vienna in those days by an ideal demo- 
crat who was also a real swell, and who was not likely 
to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be 
well thought of in every way. At a court where the 

96 




RICHAItD HILDRF:TH 

By permiissioii of William Uuiter & Co. 



KOUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister, 
could not be received for want of the requisite descents, 
it was Avell to have a minister who would not commit 
the mistake of inviting the First Society to meet the 
Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had 
done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely 
to the Second Society during the rest of his stay in 
Vienna. 

II 

One of my consular colleagues under Motley was 
another historian, of no such popularity, indeed, nor 
even of such success, but perhaps not of inferior powers. 
This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of 
one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of 
the United States, according to the testimony both of his 
liking and his misliking critics. I have never read his 
history, and I speak of it only at second hand ; but I 
had read, before I met him, his novel of A7xhy Moore, 
or The White Slave, which left an indelible impres- 
sion of his imaginative verity upon me. The impres- 
sion is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty 
years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in 
speaking of it as a powerful piece of realism. It 
treated passionately, intensely, though with a superficial 
coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the aboli- 
tion of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever be 
generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to 
any one who wishes to study that bygone condition, 
and the literature which grew out of it. I fancy it did 
not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for I used 
to see it in Italian and French translations on the book- 
stalls. I believe neither his history nor his novel 
brought the author more gain than fame. He had worn 
himself out on a newspaper when he got his appoint- 
Q 97 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

ment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the 
cloud that was wholly to darken him before he died. 
He was a tall thin man, absent, silent : already a phan- 
tom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and dig- 
nity amidst the ruin, when the worst came. 

I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in 
the snbnrbs of Trieste, and where I passed several days, 
and I remember him always reading, reading, reading. 
He could with difficulty be roused from his book by 
some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience 
as a host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost 
in his hand, and nothing could win him from it till he 
had finished it. Then he rose to go to bed. Would not 
he bid his parting guest good-bye ? The idea of farewell 
perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded with- 
out looking round, 

" They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow. 
Through Eden took their solitary way," 

and so left the room. 

I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow- 
consul concerning a deserter from an American ship 
whom I inherited from my predecessor at Venice. The 
man had already been four or five months in prison, 
and he was in a fair way to end his life there ; for it is 
our law that a deserting sailor must be kept in the con- 
sul's custody till some vessel of our flag arrives, when 
the consul can oblige the master to take the deserter 
and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel 
rarely came to Venice even in times of peace, and in 
times of war there was no hope of any. So I got leave 
of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to that 
peri:, where now and then an American ship did touch. 
The flag determines the nationality of the sailor, and 
this unhappv wretch was theoretically our fellow-citi- 

08 



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

zeii ; but when he got to Trieste he made a clean breast 
of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped 
under our flag he was a deserter from a British regi- 
ment at Malta; and he begged piteonsly not to be sent 
home to America, where he had never been in his life, 
nor ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his 
regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him 
there. The case certainly had its embarrassments ; but 
the American consul contrived to let our presimiptive 
compatriot slip into the keeping of the British consul, 
who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the 
strained relations betw^een England and America at that 
time this was a piece of masterly diplomacy. 

Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Con- 
way, who paid us a visit, and in his immediate rela- 
tions with literary Boston seemed to bring the moun- 
tain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than 
Henry Ward Beecher. He was passing through Venice 
on his way to those efforts in England in behalf of the 
Union which had a certain great effect at the time ; and 
in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, 
I can still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of 
presence, with his strong face, but kind, framed in long 
hair that swept above his massive forehead, and fell to 
the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His eyes 
quaintly gleamed at the things w^e told him of our life 
in the strange place ; but he only partly relaxed from his 
strenuous pose, and the hands that lay upon his knees 
were clinched. Afterwards, as he passed our balcony 
in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was wearing 
(many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) 
and saluted our eagle and us : we were often on the 
balcony behind the shield to attest the authenticity of 
the American eagle. 

LofC. 93 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 



III 

Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in 
my literary luck, and from the hand I could most have 
wished to reverse the adverse wheel of fortune. I had 
labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian 
comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend 
Professor ISTorton jointly editor of the North American 
Review; and he took it and wrote me one of his loveli- 
est letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all 
the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and 
Avorthy to have lived through that misery. It is one of 
the hard conditions of this state that while we can most- 
ly make out to let people taste the last drop of bitter- 
ness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are 
only semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether 
tongue-tied. As often as I tried afterwards to tell Low- 
ell of the benediction, the salvation, his letter was to 
me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have under- 
stood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the 
fulness I could have given a resentment. His mes- 
sage came after years of thwarted endeavor, and rein- 
stated me in the belief that T could still do something 
in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser 
had begun to make their impression ; among the first 
great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from 
my diplomatic chief at Vienna ; but I valued my ad- 
mission to the North American peculiarly because it 
was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his 
charge it must be the place of highest honor. He spoke 
of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me 
where he should send it, and I answered, to my father- 
in-law, who put it in his savings-bank, where he lived. 
In Brattleboro, Vermont. There it remained, and I for- 

100 



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

got all about it, so that when his affairs were settled 
some years later and I was notified that there was a sum 
to my credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I 
have nearly always felt when wrong, that I had no 
money there. The proof of my error was sent me in a 
check, and then I bethought me of the pay for " Recent 
Italian Comedy.'' 

It was not a day when I could really afford to forget 
money due me, but then it was not a great deal of 
money. The Review was as poor as it was proud, and 
I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But 
this was more than I got from the Advertiser, which 
gave me five dollars a column for my letters, printed in 
a type so fine that the money, when translated from 
greenbacks into gold at a discount of 2.80, must have 
been about a dollar a thousand words. However, I was 
richly content with that, and would gladly have let them 
have the letters for nothing. 

Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a 
book, which I sent on to Messrs. Trlibner & Co., in 
London. They had consented to look at it to oblige my 
friend Conway, w^ho during his sojourn with us in 
Venice, before his settlement in London, had been 
forced to listen to some of it. They answered me in 
due time that they would publish an edition of a thou- 
sand, at half profits, if I could get some American 
house to take five hundred copies. When I stopped in 
London I had so little hope of being able to do this that 
I asked the Trlibners if I might, without losing their 
offer, try to get some other London house to publish 
my book. They said Yes, almost joyously ; and I began 
to take my manuscript about. At most places they 
would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented 
to read it. The house promptest in refusing to con- 
sider it afterwards pirated one of my novels, and with 

101 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

some expressions of good intention in that direction, 
never paid me anything for it; though I believe the 
English still think that this sort of behavior was pecul- 
iar to the American publisher in the old buccaneering 
times. I was glad to go back to the Triibners with my 
book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a pub- 
lisher who finally agreed to take . those five hundred 
copies. This was Mr. M. ^L Ilurd, of Hurd & Hough- 
ton, a house then newly established in ISTew York and 
Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard to- 
gether, and became of a friendship which lasts to this 
day. But it was not till some months later, when I saw 
him in New York, that he consented to publish my 
book. I remember how he said, with an air of vague 
misgiving, and an effect of trying to justify himself 
in an imprudence, that it was not a great matter any- 
way. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell 
the truth I had not much myself. But the book had an 
instant success, and it has gone on from edition to edi- 
tion ever since. There was just then the interest of a 
not wholly generous surprise at American things among 
the English. Our success in putting down the great 
Confederate rebellion had caught the fancy of our 
cousins, and T think it was to this mood of theirs that 
I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. 
There were long and cordial revicAvs in all the great 
London journals, which I used to carry about with me 
like love-letters; when I tried to show them to other 
people, I could not understand their coldness concern- 
ing them. 

At Boston, where we landed on our return home, 
there was a moment when it seemed as if my small 
destiny might be linked at once with that of the city 
which later became my home. I ran into the office of 
the Advertiser to ask what had become of some sketches 

102 



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

of Italian travel I had sent the paper, and the man- 
aging editor made me promise not to take a place any- 
where before I had heard from him. I gladly prom- 
ised, but I did not hear from him, and when I returned 
to Boston a fortnight later, I found that a fatal partner 
had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon the 
paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted 
letters of mine, and I published them in the Nation, of 
iNTew York, and afterwards in the book called Italian 
Journeys. 

But after I had encountered fortune in this frown- 
ing disguise, I had a most joyful little visit with Lowell, 
which made me forget there was anything in the world 
but the delight and glory of sitting with him in his 
study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have 
been my freshness from Italy which made him talk 
chiefly of his own happy days in the land which so 
sympathetically brevets all her lovers fellow-citizens. 
At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and 
he talked late into the night, and early into the morn- 
ing. About two o'clock, when all the house was still, 
he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar, and 
came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had 
not a very learned palate in those days (or in these, for 
that matter), but I knew enough of wine to under- 
stand that these bottles had been chosen upon that prin- 
ciple which Longfellow put in verse, and used to re- 
peat with a humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hol- 
lowing of the voice : 

" If you have a friend to dine. 
Give him your best wine; 
If you have two, 
The second-best will do." 

As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to 
me of my own life and prospects, wisely and truly, as 

103 



LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

he always spoke. He said that it was enough for a man 
who had stuff in him to be known to two or three peo- 
ple, for they wouhl not suffer him to be forgotten, and 
it would rest with himself to get on. I told him that 
though I had not given up my place at Venice, I was 
not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, 
and I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try 
my best to find something ; at the worst, I could turn to 
my trade of printer. He did not think it need ever 
come to that ; and he said that he believed I should 
have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in 
hailing from the West ; I should be more of a novelt}'. 
I knew very well that even in my own West I should 
not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an 
Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my mis- 
giving against his faith. Was I not already richly suc- 
cessful ? What better thing personally could befall 
me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey, than 
to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and hav- 
ing him talk to me as if we were equal in deed and in 
fame? 

The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, 
before we said the good-night which was good-morning, 
using the sweet Italian words, and bidding each other 
the Dor ma bene which has the quality of a benediction. 
He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the 
simny kindness which never failed me, worthy or un- 
worthy; and I went away to bed. But not to sleep; 
only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of youth 
when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the 
achievement it holds highest and best. 



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 



IV 

I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I 
heard of proved impossible one way or another, in 
Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati; there was 
always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was 
again in the East. I came to N^ew York, resolved to 
fight my way in, somewhere, and I did not rest a mo- 
ment before I began the fight. 

My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley 
Hubbard's. " Get a basis,'' said the softening cynic of 
the Saturday Press, when I advised with him, among 
other acquaintances. " Get a salaried place, something 
regular on some paper, and then you can easily make 
up the rest." But it was a month before I achieved this 
vantage, and then I got it in a quarter where I had not 
looked for it. I wrote editorials on European and lit- 
erary topics for different papers, but mostly for the 
Times, and they paid me well and more than well ; but 
I was nowhere offered a basis, though once I got so far 
towards it as to secure a personal interview with the 
editor-in-chief, wlio made me feel that I had seldom 
met so busy a man. He praised some work of mine 
that he had read in his paper, but I was never recalled 
to his presence ; and now I think he judged rightly that 
I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point 
of view was artistic; I wanted time to prepare my 
effects. 

There was another and clearer prospect opened to 
me on a literary paper, then newly come to the light, 
but long since gone out in the dark. Here again my 
work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered 
the basis (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I 
was even assigned to a desk where I should write in the 
office; and the next inornlnLV I came joyfully down to 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door 
by one of the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a 
trifling affair, ^^ Well, we've concluded to waive the idea 
of an engagement," and once more my bright hopes of 
a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm 
I could, that they must do what they thought best, and 
I went on skirmishing baselessly about for this and the 
other papers which had been buying my material. 

I had begun printing in the Nation those letters 
about my Italian journeys left over from the Boston 
Advertiser; they had been liked in the office, and one 
day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking 
how I would fancy giving up outside work to come 
there and write only for the Nailon. We averaged my 
gains from all sources at forty dollars a week, and I 
had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon 
it from the skies. 

This must have been some time in November, and 
the next three or four months Avere as happy a time for 
me as I have ever known. I kept on printing my 
Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it 
(not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused 
myself very much with the treatment of social phases 
and events in a department which grew up under my 
hand. My associations personally were of the most 
agreeable kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I 
liked so much to be there, in that place and in that com- 
pany, that I hated to have each day come to an end. 

I believed that my lines were cast in Xew York for 
good and all ; and I renewed my relations with the lit- 
erary friends I had made before going abroad. I often 
stopped, on my way up tovm, at an apartment the Stod- 
dards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Sted- 
man, and reasoned high, to my hearths content, of lit- 
erary things with them and him. 

106 




ITS LINCOLN S HAND' 



EOUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his 
home in Ivennett and took an apartment in East 
Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he 
received all their friends there, with a simple and 
charming hospitality. There was another house which 
we much resorted to — the house of James Lorrimer 
Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where 
he died, I had made his acquaintance at Venice three 
years before, and I came in for my share of that love 
for literary men which all their perversities could not 
extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I 
used to think he could not have felt so deeply if he had 
been a literary man himself. There were delightful 
dinners at his house, where the wit of the Stoddards 
shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship 
and overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long 
Paris correspondent of the Tribune, humorously tried 
to talk himself into the resolution of spending the rest 
of his life in his own country. There was one evening 
when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence 
and aspect, sang the most killingly comic songs; and 
there was another evening when, after we all went into 
the library, something tragical happened. Edwin 
Booth was of our nimiber, a gentle, rather silent per- 
son in company, or with at least little social initia- 
tive, who, as his fate would, went up to the cast of a 
huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. " Whose 
hand is this, Lorry f ' he asked our host, as he took it up 
and turned it over in both his own hands. Graham 
feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again, " Whose 
hand is this V' Then there was nothing for Graham 
but to say, " It's Lincoln's hand," and the man for 
whom it meant such unspeakable things put it softly 
dowTi without a word. 

107 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 



It was one of the disappointments of a time whicli 
was nearly all joj that I did not then meet a man who 
meant hardly less than Lowell himself for me. George 
William Curtis was during my first winter in New 
York away on one of the long lecturing rounds to which 
he gave so many of his winters, and I did not see him 
till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton's in Cam- 
bridge, lie then characteristically spent most of the 
evening in discussing an obscure point in Browning's 
poem of My Lost Duchess. I have long forgotten what 
the point was, but not the cliarm of Curtis's person- 
ality, his fine presence, his benig-n politeness, his almost 
deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. After- 
wards I saw him again and again in Boston and New 
York, but always with a sense of something elusive in 
his graciousness, for which something in me must have 
been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth 
that in those days was apt to shiver in any but the 
higher temperatures, and yet I felt that I made no 
advance in his kindness towards anything like the 
friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I 
was so thoroughly attuned to their mood that I could 
not be put in unison with another; and perhaps in 
Curtis there was really not the material of much in- 
timacy. 

He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of 
welcome he gave equally to all men; and if I asked 
more I was not reasonable. Yet he was never far from 
any man of good - will, and he was the intimate of 
multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. 
In this sort he had become my friend when he made 
bis first great speech on the Kansas question in 1855, 

108 



EOUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

AX'hich will seem as remote to the young men of this 
day as the Thermopylse question to which he likened 
it. I was his admirer^ his lover, his worshipper be- 
fore that for the things he had done in literature, for 
the Howadji books, and for tlie lovely fantasies of 
Prue and I, and for the sound-hearted satire of the 
Potiphar Papers, and now suddenly I learnt that 
this brilliant and graceful talent, this travelled and 
accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had 
dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western 
village obscurity, was a man with the heart to feel 
the wrongs of men so little friended then as to be 
denied all the rights of men. I do not remember 
any passage of the speech, or any word of it, but I 
remember the joy, the pride with which the soul of 
youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the 
goodness it may love. Mere politicians might be pro- 
slavery or anti-slavery without touching me very much, 
but here was the citizen of a world far greater than 
theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who 
was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just 
cause, and that was all in all to me. His country was 
my country, and his kindred my kindred, and nothing 
could have kept me from following after him. 

His whole life taught the lesson that the world is 
well lost whenever the world is wrong; but never, I 
think, did any life teach this so sweetly, so winningly. 
The wrong world itself might have been entreated by 
him to be right, for he was one of the few reformers 
who have not in some measure mixed their love of man 
with hate of men; his quarrel was with error, and not 
with the persons who were in it. He was so gently 
steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of 
him as a fanatic, though manv who held his opinions 
were assailed as fanatics, and suffered the shame if they 

109 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

did not win the pakii of martyrdom. In early life he 
was a communist, and that when he came out of Brook 
Farm into the world which he was so well fitted to 
adorn, and which would so gladly have kept him all 
its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of 
the world which abhorred abolitionists. He was a be- 
liever in the cause of women's rights, which has no 
picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the sense 
of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at 
him. The man who was in the last degree amiable was 
to the last degree unyielding where conscience was con- 
cerned; the soul which was so tender had no weakness 
in it; his lenity Avas the divination of a finer justice. 
His honesty made all men trust him Avhen they doubted 
his opinions ; his good sense made them doubt their own 
opinions, when they had as little question of their own 
honesty. 

I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of 
letters only, for humanity was above the humanities 
with him, and we all know how he turned from the 
fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of 
politics because he believed that duty led the way, and 
that good citizens were needed more than good ro- 
mancers. No doubt they are, and yet it must always be 
a keen regret w^ith the men of my generation who wit- 
nessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, 
that he could not have devoted it wholly to the beauti- 
ful, and let others look after the true. NTow that I 
liave said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know well 
enough that what he did was best ; but if my regret is 
mean, I will let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood 
which many have been in concerning him. 

There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value 
of some of the results he achieved in that other path. 
He did indeed create anew for us the type of good-citi- 

110 



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 

zenstiip, wellnigh effaced in a sordid and selfish time, 
and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journal- 
ist. He never really forsook literature, and the world 
of actual interests and experiences afforded him outlooks 
and perspectives, without which sesthetic endeavor is 
self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of let- 
ters, he was a great orator, he was a great political 
journalist, he was a great citizen, he was a great philan- 
thropist. But that last word with its conventional ap- 
plication scarcely describes the brave and gentle friend 
of men that he was. He was one that helped others by 
all that he did, and said, and was, and the circle of his 
use was as wide as his fame. There are other great 
men, plenty of them, common great men, whom we 
know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let 
the ages have when they die, for, living or dead, they are 
alike remote from us. They have never been with us 
where we live ; but this great man was the neighbor, the 
contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or 
heard him; and even in the swift forgetting of this 
electrical age the stamp of his personality will not be 
effaced from their minds or hearts. 

VI 

Of those evenings at the Taylors's in New York, I can 
recall best the one which was uiost significant for me, 
and even fatefully significant. Mr. and Mrs. Fields 
were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure 
of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields 
said, mockingly, '' Don't despise Boston !" and I an- 
swered, as we shook hands, '^ Few are worthy to live in 
Boston. It was New- Year's eve, and that night it came 
on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly 
plough its way up to Forty-seventh Street through the 

111 



LITEKAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

drifts. The next day and the next, I wrote at home, 
because it was so hard to get down town. The third day 
I reached the office and found a letter on my desk from 
Fields, asking how I should like to come to Boston and 
be his assistant on the Atlantic Monthly. I submitted 
the matter at once to my chief on the Nation, and with 
his frank good-will I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of 
Ticknor & Fields, Avho was to see me further about it if 
I wished, when he came to New York ; and then I went 
to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details. I was 
to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with con- 
tributors ; I was to do tlie literary proof-reading of the 
magazine ; and I was to Avrite the four or five pages of 
book-notices, which were then printed at the end of the 
periodical in finer type ; and I was to have forty dollars 
a week. I said that I was getting that already for less 
work, and then Mr. Fields offered me ten dollars more. 
Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st of March, 
which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston 
and began my work. I had not decided to accept the 
place without advising with Lowell ; he counselled the 
step, and gave me some shrewd and useful suggestions. 
The w^hole affair was conducted by Fields with his un- 
failing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from 
me that the qualification I had as practical printer for 
the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and 
that as proof-reader I w^as expected to make it avail on 
the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the 
course of humble-pie must always come in ; and if I did 
not wholly relish this bit of it, I dare say it was good for 
me, and I digested it perfectly. 



part 3fourtb 

LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

AMOjNG my fellow-passengers on the train from 
Nlew York to Boston, when I went to begin my 
work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the At- 
lantic MontJily, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the 
Springfield Republican, who created in a subordinate 
city a journal of metropolitan importance. I had met 
him in Venice several years earlier, when he was suf- 
fering from the cruel insomnia which had followed 
his overwork on that newspaper, and when he told me 
that he was sleeping scarcely more than one hour out 
of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery 
which this must have been, and which lasted in some 
measure while he lived, though I believe that rest 
and travel relieved him in his later years. He was 
always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now ex- 
pressed a most gratifying interest when I told him 
what I was going to do in Boston. He gave himself 
the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality 
of the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was 
about to share in the destinies of the great literary 
periodical of New England. 



I do not think that such a fact would now move the 
fancy of the liveliest newspaper man, so much has the 
H 113 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

West since returned upon the East in a refluent wave 
of authorship. But then the West was almost an un- 
known quality in our literary problem; and in fact 
there was scarcely any literature outside of New Eng- 
land. Even this was of New England origin, for it 
was almost wholly the work of New England men 
and women in the '^ splendid exile " of New York. 
The Atlantic Monthly, which was distinctively lit- 
erary, was distinctively a New England magazine, 
though from the first it had been characterized 
by what was more national, what was more 
universal, in the New England temperament. Its 
chief contributors for nearly twenty years were 
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson, Doc- 
tor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, 
Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Pres- 
cott Spofford, Mrs. Phelps Ward, and other New Eng- 
land writers who still lived in New England, and 
largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there 
came a poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. 
Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and Mrs. Stoddard, from 
Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, 
except the last, were not only of New England race, 
but of New England birth. I think there was no con- 
tributor from the South but Mr. M. T). Conway, and as 
yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets 
from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of 
Puritan origin, had appeared in early numbers; Alice 
Cary, living with her sister in New York, had written 
now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay 
solely represented Illinois by a single paper, and he 
was of Rhode Island stock. It was after my settle- 
ment at Boston that ]\Iark Twain, of Missouri, became 
a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer 
after, that Mr. Bret Harte made that progress East- 

114 




JULIA WARD HOWE 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

ward from California which was telegraphed almost 
from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a 
prince. Miss Constance F. Woolson had not yet be- 
gun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Mau- 
rice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, 
Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, 
Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I 
name at random among other A¥estern writers, were then 
as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives 
Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, 
^Ir. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South, which they by 
no means fully represent. 

The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the 
beginning to discover any outlying literature; but, as 
I have said, there was in those days very little good 
writing done beyond the borders of New England. If 
the case is now different, and the best known among 
living American writers are no longer New-England- 
ers, still I do not think the South and West have yet 
trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the new 
writers now more commonly appear in those quarters, 
I should not be so very sure that they are not still 
characterized by New England ideals and examples. 
On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day 
we were characterized by them, and wished to be so; 
we even felt that we failed in so far as we expressed 
something native quite in our own way. The literary 
theories we accepted were New England theories, the 
criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, 
more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston criti- 
cism. 

n 

Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic 
whom I have mentioned, it is of course known that 

115 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Longfellow and Lowell lived in Cambridge, Emerson 
at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel Hig- 
ginson was still and for many years afterwards at 
NTewport ; Mrs. Stowe was then at Andover ; Miss Pres- 
cott of Newburyport had become Mrs. Spofford, and 
was presently in Boston, where her husband was a 
member of the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as 
Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, dwelt in her father's 
house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were 
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor 
Hale. Yet Boston stood for the whole ^lassachusetts 
group, and Massachusetts, in the literary impulse, 
meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, 
whether we like to do so or not, that the impulse seems 
now to have pretty well spent itself. Certainly the 
city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature, 
though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do 
not think there are in Boston to-day even so many tal- 
ents with a literary coloring in law, science, theology, 
and journalism as there were formerly; though I have 
no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler 
than before. I arrived in Boston, however, when all 
talents had more or less a literary coloring, and when 
the greatest talents were literary. These expressed 
with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith 
and brought forth in good works; but that moment of 
maturity was the beginning of a decadence which 
could only show itself much later. Xew England has 
ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never 
again have anything like a national literature; but 
that was something like a national literature; and it 
will probably be centuries yet before the life of the 
whole country, the American life as distinguished 
from the N'ew England life, shall have anything so 
like a national literature. It will be long before our 

116 




HAIITIIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD 



LITEEARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

larger life interprets itself in such imagination as 
ITa\\i:liorne'Sj such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry 
as Longfellow's, such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit 
and grace as Holmes's, such humor and humanity as 
Lowell's. 

The literature of those great men was, if I may suf- 
fer myself the figure, the Socinian graft of a Calvinist 
stock. Their faith, in its varied shades, was Unitari- 
an, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was imper- 
fect — and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had 
its imperfections — it was marred by the intense ethi- 
cism that pervaded the New England mind for two 
hundred years, and that still characterizes it. They 
or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in 
the great schism at the beginning of the century, but, 
as if their heterodoxy were conscience-stricken, they 
still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did ; some 
pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they 
all pointed it. I should be far from blaming them 
for their ethical intention, though I think they felt 
their vocation as prophets too much for their good as 
poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the ser- 
mon, thougli not always, nor nearly ahvays. It was in 
poetry and in romance that they excelled ; in the novel, 
so far as they attempted it, they failed. I say this 
Yvdth the names of all the Bostonian group, and those 
they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their 
greatness. It may be ungracious to say that they have 
left no heirs to their peculiar greatness; but it would 
be foolish to say that they left an estate where they had 
none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such a 
fantasy as Judd's ATargaret. The only New-England- 
er who has attempted the novel on a scale proportioned 
to the work of the New-Englanders in philosophy, in 
poetrv, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New 

117 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Haven, and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions 
of Doctor Holmes, or the vivid inventions of Doctor 
Hale, but I do not call them novels ; and I do not for- 
get the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss 
Wilkins, which is free from the ethicism of the great 
N'ew England group, but which has hardly the novel- 
ists's scope. N'ew England, in Hawthorne's work, 
achieved supremacy in romance ; but the romance is 
always an allegory, and the novel is a picture in which 
the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized 
office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her 
novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience 
in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life 
itself. 

Even when we come to the exception that proves the 
rule, even to such a signal exception as Uncle Tom's 
Cabin, I think that what I say holds true. That is 
almost the greatest work of imagination that we have 
produced in prose, and it is the work of a New Eng- 
land woman, writing from all the inspirations and tra- 
ditions of New England. It is like begging the ques- 
tion to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but 
really, is it a novel, in the sense that War and Peace 
is a novel, or Madame Flaubert, or L'Assommoir, or 
Phineas Finn, or Doiia Perfecta, or Esther Waters, 
or Marta y Maria, or The Return of the Native, or 
Virgin Soil, or David Grieve? In a certain way it is 
greater than any of these except the first ; but its chief 
virtue, or its prime virtue, is in its address to the con- 
science, and not its address to the taste; to the ethical 
sense, not the sesthetical sense. 

This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, 
and I should be sorry if it conveyed to any reader a 
sense of slight ; for I believe no one has felt more deep- 
ly than myself the value of N'ew England in literature. 

118 




PARK STKKET CHURCH, BOSTON 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to 
the literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the 
reviewers has never seemed to me accurate or adequate, 
and it holds chiefly in the fact that both seem to be of 
the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in 
literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more 
than Edinburgh ever was, at least in quality. The 
Scotch literature of the palmy days was not wholly 
Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it 
flowered in the air of an alien speech. But the New 
England literature of the great day was the blossom of 
a New England root ; and the language which the Bos- 
tonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly 
the heirs of those who had brought the learning of the 
universities to Massachusetts Bay two himdred years 
before, and was of as pure a lineage as the English of 
the mother-country. 

Ill 

The literary situation which confronted me when I 
came to Boston was, then, as native as could well be; 
and whatever value I may be able to give a personal 
study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as 
one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not 
pretend that I saw it in its entirety, and I have no hope 
of presenting anything like a kinetoscopic impression 
of it. What I can do is to give here and there a glimpse 
of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the 
fact that it was in a " state of transition," as everything 
is always and everywhere. It was no sooner recog- 
nizably native than it ceased to be fully so; and I be- 
came a witness of it after the change had begun. The 
publishing house which so long embodied New England 
literature was already attempting enterprises out of 
the line of its traditions, and one of these had brought 

119 



LITERARY FRIP:NDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks be- 
fore I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality 
which I think never impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. 
Mr. Aldrich was the editor of Every Saturday when I 
came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. 
We were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct 
and distinguished priority of reputation, insomuch that 
in my Western remoteness I had always ranged him 
with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and 
Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth 
I found him, with every imaginable charm of contem- 
poraneity. It is no part of the office which I have in- 
tended for these slight and sufficiently wandering 
glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final 
place; and above all I do not presume to assign any 
living man his rank or station. But I should be false 
to my o\\Ti grateful sense of beauty in the w^ork of this 
poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to 
an ideal which his name stands for. He is known in 
several kinds, but to my thinking he is best in a certain 
nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the 
thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he 
loves and honors so much. Sometimes the file slips in 
his hold, as the file must and will; it is but an instru- 
ment at the best ; but there is no mistouch in the hand 
that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulsi 
of the poet's heart quick and true in it. There are son- 
nets of his, grave, and simple, and lofty, which I think 
of with the glow and thrill possible only from very 
beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion 
as we can feel only 

" When a great thought strikes along the brain 
And flushes all the cheek." 

When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose 
that in the employ of tlie kindly house we were both so 

120 




LOOKING OUT OF BOYLSTON PLACE 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

eager to serve, our dignities were about tlie same ; for 
if the Atlantic Monthly was a somewhat prouder affair 
than an eclectic weekly like Every Saturday, he was 
supreme in his place, and I was subordinate in mine. 
The house was careful, in the attitude of its senior 
partner, not to distinguish between us, and we were 
not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us ; we 
had our own joke of it; we compared notes to find 
whether we were equally used in this thing or that; 
and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with 
Fields himself. 

We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of 
joy in the life which seems to have been pretty nearly 
all joy, as I look back upon it) in the partner who be- 
came afterwards the head of the house, and who fore- 
cast in his bold enterprises the change from a New Eng- 
land to an American literary situation. In the end 
James R. Osgood failed, though all his enterprises suc- 
ceeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not infrequent. 
They were greater than his powers and his means, and 
before they could reach their full fruition, they had 
to be enlarged to men of longer purse and longer pa- 
tience. He was singularly fitted both by instinct and 
by education to become a great publisher ; and he early 
perceived that if a leading American house were to con- 
tinue at Boston, it must be hospitable to the talents of 
the whole country. He founded his future upon those 
generous lines ; but he wanted the qualities as well as the 
resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes be- 
gan to follow each other rapidly after he came into 
control of the house. Misfortune reduced the size and 
number of its periodicals. The Young Follcs was sold 
outright, and the North American Review (long before 
Mr. Rice bought it and carried it to New York) was 
cut do^\Ti one-half, so that Aldrich said. It looked as if 

121 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Destiny had sat upon it. His own periodical, Every 
Saturday, was first enlarged to a stately quarto and il- 
lustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities fol- 
lowing the great Boston Fire, it collapsed to its former 
size. Then hoth the Atlantic Monthly and Every Sat- 
urday were sold away from their old ownership, and 
Every Saturday was suppressed altogether, and we two 
ceased to be of the same employ. There was some sort 
of evening rite (more funereal than festive) the day 
after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away 
from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was 
his necessity that had caused him to part with the peri- 
odicals ; but he professed that it was his pleasure, and 
he said, He had not felt so light-hearted since he was a 
boy. We asked him. How could he feel gay when he 
was no longer paying us our salaries, and how could he 
justify it to his conscience? He liked our mocking, 
and limped away from us w^ith a rheumatic easing of 
his weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic 
now that it has gone the way to dusty death, and dear 
to memory through benefactions unalloyed by one un- 
kindness. 

IV 

/■ 

But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the At- 
lantic Monthly and Harper s then divided our maga- 
zine world between them; the North American Review, 
in the control of Lowell and Professor ISTorton, had 
entered upon a new life; Every Saturday was an in- 
stant success in the charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by 
taste and training one of the best editors; and Our 
Young Folhs had the field of juvenile periodical litera- 
ture to itself. 

It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and 
of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, who had come from western 
•^ 122 




JAMES R. OSGOOD 



LITEKARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

"New York, where he was born, and must be noted as 
one of the first returners from the setting to the rising 
sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later 
boyhood, and he still breathes Boston air, where he 
dwells in the street called Pleasant, on the shore of Spy 
Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the magic web of 
his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their popu- 
larity the fame of a poet which I do not think will al- 
ways suffer that eclipse, for his poems show him to 
have looked deeply into the heart of common humanity 
with a true and tender sense of it. 

Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to 
date in the generation that elapsed between the time I 
first saw her and the time I saw her last, a year or two 
before her death. A goodness looked out of her comely 
face, which made me think of the Madonna's in 
Titian's " Assumption," and her whole aspect express- 
ed a mild and friendly spirit which I find it hard to put 
in words. She was never of the fine world of litera- 
ture; she dwelt wlxere she was born, in that unfashion- 
able Beverly which is not Beverly Farms, and was of 
a simple, sea-faring. God-fearing race, as she has told 
in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, A New 
England Girlhood. She was the author of many poems, 
whose number she constantly enlarged, but she was 
chiefly, and will be most lastingly, famed for the one 
poem, " Hannah Binding Shoes," which years before 
my days in Boston had made her so widely known. She 
never again struck so deep or so true a note ; but if one 
has lodged such a note in the ear of time, it is enough ; 
and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very well 
hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could 
say to the great others there, " I wrote ^ Hannah Binding 
Shoes.' " Her poem is very, very sad, as all who have 
read it will remember; but Miss Larcom herself was 

123 



LITEKAEY FRIENDS A^D ACQUAINTANCE 

above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mel- 
low richness which willingly made itself heard. She 
was not only of true New England stock, and a Boston 
author by right of race, but she came up to that city 
every winter from her native town. 

By the same right and on the same terms, another 
New England poetess, whom I met those first days in 
Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw Celia Thax- 
ter she was just beginning to make her effect with those 
poems and sketches which the sea sings and flashes 
through as it sings and flashes around the Isles of 
Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood had been 
passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was 
a most beautiful creature, still very young, with a 
slender flgure, and an exquisite perfection of feature; 
she was in presence what her work was: fine, frank, 
finished. I do not know whether otlier witnesses of our 
literary history feel that the public has failed to keep 
her as fully in mind as her work merited ; but I do not 
think there can be any doubt but our literature would 
be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is inter- 
esting to remember how closely she kept to her native 
field, and it is wonderful to consider how richly she 
made those sea-beaten rocks to blossom. Something 
strangely full and bright came to her verse from the 
mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of 
leaf and tint that it gave the narrower flower-plots of her 
native isles. Her gift, indeed, could not satisfy itself 
with the terms of one art alone, however varied, and 
she learned to express in color the thoughts and feel- 
ings impatient of the pallor of words. 

She remains in my memories of that far Boston 
a distinct and vivid personality; as the authoress of 
Amber Gods, and I71 a Cellar, and Circum- 
stance, and those other wild romantic tales, remains 

124 




CELIA THAXTER 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

the gentle and somewhat evanescent presence I found 
her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs. Spofford, and her 
husband was a rising young politician of the day. It 
was his duties as member of the General Court that 
had brought them up from Newbury port to Boston for 
that first winter ; and I remember that the evening 
when we met he was talking of their some time going 
to Italy that she might study for imaginative litera- 
ture certain Italian cities he named. I have long since 
ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I felt a 
pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I 
could; and now I heartily wish she could have ful- 
filled that purpose if it was a purpose, or realized 
that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps, 
however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of 
hers, which had taken the fancy of the young readers 
of that day, needed the cold New England background 
to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors 
of light. Its effects w^ere such as could not last, or 
could not be farther evolved ; they were the expression 
of youth musing away from its environment and smit- 
ten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the 
great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of 
romantic motives and passions. But for what they 
were, I can never think them other than what they ap- 
peared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singu- 
larly poetic mind. I feel better than I can say how 
necessarily they were the emanations of a New Eng- 
land mind, and how to the subtler sense they must im- 
part the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities 
which are the long result of puritanism in the physiog- 
nomy of New^ England life. 

Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter 
study of this life in many tales and sketches which 
showed an increasing mastery ; but they could not have 

125 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent 
trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, 
peculiar to it. From time to time I still come upon a 
poem of hers which recalls that earlier strain of music, 
of color, and I am content to trust it for my abiding 
faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty 
years. 



I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with 
no thought of giving a complete prospect of literary 
Boston thirty years ago. I am aware that it will seem 
sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I would 
have the reader always keep in mind the great fames 
at Cambridge and at Concord, which formed so large 
a part of the celebrity of Boston. I would also like 
him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where 
every one knew every one else, and whose metropoli- 
tan liberation from neighborhood was just begun. 

Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the 
critic Edwin P. Whipple, whose sympathies were in- 
definitely wider than his traditions. He was a most 
generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; 
and though I suppose we should call him an old- 
fashioned critic now, I suspect it would be with no dis- 
tinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He was cer- 
tainly as friendly to what promised well in the young- 
er men as he was to what was done well in their 
elders; and there was no one writing in his day 
whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might 
happen that his foibles w^ould escape Whipple's cen- 
sure. He wrote strenuously and of course conscien- 
tiously; his point of view was solely and always that 
which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt 
if he had any theory of criticism except to find out 

126 




\ivi^:;^^K^ 



\ \ WW \ '(^"W^ 




E. P. WHIPPLE 



LITEKARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

what was gocxl in an author and praise it; and he 
rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was 
gestheticallj bad. In this he was strictly of New Eng- 
land, and he was of New England in a certain general 
intelligence, which constantly grew with an interrog- 
ative habit of mind. 

He liked to talk to you of what he had found charac- 
teristic in your work, to analyze you to yourself; and 
the very modesty of the man, which made such a study 
impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes 
rendered him insensible to the sufferings of his sub- 
ject. He had a keen perception of humor in others, 
but he had very little humor ; he had a love of the beau- 
tiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes great- 
er than his sense of it. 

I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, 
not recently renewed. Of the presence of the man I 
have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short, ecclesi- 
asticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a 
silk hat of strict decorum, and between the two a 
square face with square features, intensified in their 
regard by a pair of very large glasses, and the promi- 
nent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a 
type of out-dated New England scholarship in these 
aspects, but in the hospitable qualities of his mind and 
heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the memory 
of all who ever knew him. 

Out of the vague of that far-off time another face 
and figure, as essentially New England as this, and yet 
so different, relieve themselves. Charles F. Browne, 
whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the 
English speech could carry laughter, was a Western- 
ized Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to 
the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary 
product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature 

127 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to 
London, with intervals of New York and the lecture 
platform, four or five years before I saw him in Bos- 
ton, shortly after I went there. We had met in Ohio, 
and he had personally explained to me the ducatless 
well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New Y^ork; but many 
men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus 
Ward before I grasped it one day in front of the Tre- 
mont Temple. He did not recognize me, but he gave 
me at once a greeting of great impersonal cordiality, 
with " How do you do ? When did you come ?" and 
other questions that had no concern in them, till I be- 
gan to dawn upon liim through a cloud of other half- 
remembered faces. Then he seized my hand and 
wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly 
demands with an intonation that was now ^' Why, how 
are you, — how are you ?" for me alone. It was a bit 
of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his im- 
pending doom: this was already stamped upon his 
wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death--look. His 
large, loose mouth was drawn, for all its laughter at 
the fact which he owned ; his profile, which burlesqued 
an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle ; his lank 
length of limb trembled away with him when we part- 
ed. I did not see him again ; I scarcely heard of him 
till I heard of his death, and this sad image remains 
with me of the humorist who first gave the world a 
taste of the humor which characterizes the whole 
American people. 

VI 

I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in 
my relation to the magazine, and early that winter 
I met one who remains in my mind above all others 
a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, 

128 



«1 , 




GEORGE TICKNOR 



LITERAKY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

but he embodied certain social traits which were so 
characteristic of literary Boston that it could not be 
approached without their recognition. The Muses 
have often been acknowledged to be very nice young 
persons, but in Boston they were really ladies; in Bos- 
ton literature was of good family and good society in 
a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be 
said even that reform was of good family in Boston; 
and literature, and reform equally shared the regard of 
Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of the most aris- 
tocratic in New England. I had known him by his 
novel of We7isley (it came so near being a first-rate 
novel), and by his Life of Josiah Quincyj then a new 
book, but still better by his Boston letters to the New 
York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti- 
slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other per- 
sons of distinction in Boston, who did not see the right 
so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their in- 
terests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their 
fault was all the more comical because it was the error 
of men otherwise so correct, of characters so stainless, 
of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters got out 
of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affect- 
ed me as the finest patrician type I had ever met. He 
was charmingly handsome, with a nose of most fit 
aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, " educated whiskers," 
and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his 
voice delightful, when at our first meeting he made me 
his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness for having 
used in my Venetian Life, the Briticism directly for 
as soon as. 

Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any 
calling or profession, because when he found himself 
in the enjoyment of a moderate income on leaving col- 
lege, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too 
I 129 



LitERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

triiich of a man to be merely that, and he was an aboli- 
tionist, a journalist, and for conscience' sake a satirist. 
Of that political mood of society which he satirized was 
an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to 
meet in my early days in Boston; and if his great 
sweetness and kindness had not instantly won my lik- 
ing, I should still have been glad of the glimpse of the 
older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance 
with George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Span- 
ish literature, the friend and biographer of Prescott, 
and a leading figure of the intellectual society of an 
epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick 
mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street 
and Beacon, though simk now to a variety of business 
uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. The interior 
was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and 
of lettered elegance in the library, where the host re- 
ceived his guests, which seemed to pervade the whole 
house, and which made its appeal to the imagination of 
one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to 
be master of such circmnstance and keeping would be 
enough of life in a certain way; and it all lingers in 
my memory yet, as if it were one with the gentle cour- 
tesy which welcomed me. 

Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. 
Hillard, now a faded reputation, and even then a life 
defeated of the high expectation of its youth. I do not 
know whether his Six Months in Italy still keeps itself 
in print ; but it was a book once very well known ; and 
he was perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host 
was, because of our common Italian background. Tie 
was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and I sup- 
pose that order of things imparted its tone to what T 
felt and saw in that place. The civil war had come 
and gone, and that order accepted the result if not with 

130 







<,y^. 



THE TICKNOR MAKSION, BOSTON 



LITEKAKY BOSTON AS I KNEW* IT 

faith, then with patience. There were two young Eng- 
lish noblemen there that night, who had been travelling 
in the South, and whose stories of the wretched condi- 
tions they had seen moved our host to some open mis- 
giving. But the Englishmen had no question ; in spito 
of all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when 
I ventured to say that now at least there could be a 
hope of better things, while the old order was only the 
perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a 
gesture of the hand that waived the point, and a deep- 
ly sightd, '^ Perhps ; perhaps.'' 

He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to 
recall the past with a steadfast allegiance, and yet to 
relax itself towards the present in the wisdom of the ac- 
cumulated years. His whole life had been passed in 
devotion to polite literature and in the society of the 
polite world ; and he was a type of scholar such as only 
the circumstances of Boston could form. Those cir- 
cumstances could alone form such another type 
as Quincy; and I wish I could have felt then as I do 
now the advantage of meeting them so contemporane- 
ously. 

VII 

The historian of Spanish literature was an old man 
nearer eighty than seventy when I saw him, and I re- 
call of him personally his dark tint, and the scholarly 
refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me 
rather English than American in character. He was 
quite exterior to the Atlantic group of writers, and had 
no interest in me as one of it. Literary Boston of that 
day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; and I 
understood that it was only in my quality of stranger 
that I saw the different phases of it. I should not be 
just to a vivid phase if I failed to speak of Mrs. Julia 

131 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which she per- 
sonified. I did not sympathize with this then so much 
as I do now, but I coiild appreciate it on the intellectual 
side. Once, many years later, I heard Mrs. Howe 
speak in public, and it seemed to me that she made one 
of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for 
the first time a notion of what women might do in that 
sort if they entered public life; but when we met in 
those earlier days I was interested in her as perhaps 
our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to 
speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings 
in life, and I remember how she once brought to book 
a youthful matron who had perhaps unduly lamented 
the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand, 
^' Child, where is your religion?" After the many years 
of an acquaintance which had not nearly so many meet- 
ings as years, it was pleasant to find her, at the latest, 
as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as eager 
to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old 
age she survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, 
but a still higher impulse of Boston she will not sur- 
vive, for that will last while the city endures. 

VIII 

The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others 
that formed the great N'ew England group, and with 
whom in my earlier ignorance I had always fanciecj^ 
them mingling. INow and then I met Doctor Holmes 
at Longfellow's table, but not oftener than now and 
then, and I never saw Emerson in Cambridge at all 
except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on 
the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would ad- 
dress me some grave, rather retrorsive civilities, after 
I had been newly introduced to him, as I had alwaj's 

132 



LITERAEY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he 
did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I 
am far from blaming him for that : on such points there 
might easily be two opinions, and I was myself often of 
the mind I imagined in him. 

If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was 
not of those qualities of things which even then, it was 
said, he could remember so much better than things 
themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him 
in the Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily 
set, as he moved like one to whose vision 

" Heaven opens inward, chasm yawn, 
Vast images in glimmering dawn, 
Half shown, are broken and withdrawn." 

It is known how before the end the eclipse became 
total and from moment to moment the record inscribed 
upon his mind was erased. Some years before he died 
I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an 
Atlantic Breakfast where it was part of my editorial 
function to preside. When he was not asking me who 
she was, I could hear him asking her who I was. His 
great soul worked so independently of memory as we con- 
ceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could 
not help wondering if, after all, our personal continu- 
ity, our identity hereafter, was necessarily trammeled 
up with our enduring knowledge of what happens here. 
His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and 
yet his character, his personality, his identity fully per- 
sisted. 

I do not know whether the things that we printed 
for Emerson after his memory began to fail so utterl)- 
were the work of earlier years or not, but I know that 
they were of his best. There were certain poems which 
could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, 

133 



LITERARY FRIi^NDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

or fashioned with a keener and juster self-criticism. 
His vision transcended his time so far that some who 
have tired themselves out in trying to catch up Avith 
him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all ; 
but I doubt if these form the last court of appeal in 
his case. In manner, he was very gentle, like all those 
great 'New England men, but he was cold, like many 
of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who 
came newly. As I have elsewhere recorded, I once 
heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and once he 
expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy 
of Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all 
his friends supposed it had borne its best fruit. But I 
recall no mention of Longfellow, or Lowell, or Whittier 
from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon 
Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing 
the interest posterity might take in the matter, and re- 
ferred to Whitman's public use of his privately written 
praise as something altogether unexpected. He did not 
disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not in- 
dignantly) that there had been an abuse of it. 

IX 

The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room 
at the publishing office, where I had come upon some 
editorial errand to my chief. He introduced me to 
the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut, 
with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid 
black eyes. It was just after his poem. Snow Bound, 
had made its great success, in the modest fashion of 
those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but 
twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compli- 
ment. I contrived to say that I could not tell him how 
much I liked it; and he received the inadequate ex- 




THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

pression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion 
as he would have met something more explicit and 
abundant. If he had judged fit to take my contract off 
my hands in any way, I think he would have been less 
able to do so than any of his New England contempo- 
raries. In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm 
was bound by the frosty Puritanic air, and he was doubly 
cold to the touch of the stranger, though he would thaw 
out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I my- 
self never got so far with him as to experience this geni- 
ality, though afterwards we became such friends as an 
old man and a young man could be who rarely met. 
Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a sec- 
ond meeting, about Bayard Taylor's Story of Kennett, 
which had then lately appeared, and which he praised 
for its fidelity to Quaker character in its less amiable 
aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own 
Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things 
I had to be proud of), and he therefore spoke the more 
frankly of those traits of brutality into which, the primi- 
tive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He 
thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously 
guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and 
he matched with stories of his own some things I had 
heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who 
were Foes to good manners. 

Whittier was one of the most generous of men tow- : 
ards the work of others, especially the work of a new 
man, and if I did anything that he liked, I could count 
upon him for cordial recognition. In th quiet of his 
country home at Danvers he apparently read all the 
magazines, and kept himself fullj^ abreast of the liter- 
ary movement, but I doubt if he so fully appreciated 
the importance of the social movement. Like some 
others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imag- 

135 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

ine that mankind had won itself a clear field by destroy- 
ing chattel slavery, and he had no sympathy Avith those 
who think that the man who may any moment be out of 
work is industrially a slave. This is not strange ; so 
few men last over from one reform to another that the 
wonder is that any should, not that one should not. 
Whittier was prophet for one great need of the divine to 
man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times 
was like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of 
midsummer sunshine. It was hard to associate with the 
man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the passion of his 
verse. This imbued not only his anti-slavery utter- 
ances, but equally his ballads of the old witch and 
Quaker persecution, and flashed a far light into the 
dimness where his interrogations of Mystery pierced. 
Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New 
England poets in the great and final account, it seems 
to me that certain of these pieces make his place secure. 
There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this 
so strongly that when I came to have full charge of the 
magazine, I ventured once to distinguish. He sent me 
a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and beg him 
for something else. He magnanimously refrained from 
all show of offence, and after a while, when he had print- 
ed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time, 
I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem 
returned, but as to my function regarding him and such 
as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did 
I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality 
sent me. I took it and printed it, and praised the gods ; 
and even now I think that with such men it was not 
my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they 
had made what it was. They had set it in authority 
over American literature, and it was not for me to put 
myself in authority over them. Their fame was in 

136 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard ic 
against them. 

After that experience I not only practised an eager 
acquiescence in their wish to reach the public through 
the Atlantic, but I used all the delicacy I was master of 
in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost did 
not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in 
one instance with Emerson. He had given me upon 
much entreaty a poem which was one of his greatest 
and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative 
at odds with its verb. We had some trouble in recon- 
ciling them, and some other delays, and meanwhile 
Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same num- 
ber. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's 
poem back in time for it, but unluckily the proof did 
come back in time, and then I had to choose between 
my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, 
and let them choose what I should do. I really felt 
that Doctor Holmes had the right to precedence, since 
Emerson had withheld his proof so long that I could not 
count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as 
nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent 
to let me put his poem over to the next number, or 
would prefer to have it appear in the same number 
with Doctor Holmes's ; the subjects were cognate, and I 
had my misgivings. He w^rote me back to " return the 
proofs and break up the forms.'' I could not go to this 
iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the maga- 
zine, but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling 
that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that 
there could be such ire in heavenly minds. 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 



Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, 
but Whittier never; and I have a feeling that poet as 
Cambridge felt him to be, she had her reservations con- 
cerning him. I cannot put these into words which 
would not oversay them, but they Avere akin to those 
she might have refined upon in regard to Mrs. Stowe. 
Neither of these great writers would have appeared to 
Cambridge of the last literary quality ; their fame was 
with a world too vast to be the test that her own 

"One entire and perfect crysolite" 

would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived 
at the clear splendor of his later work without some 
earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time ca- 
pable of a false rhyme, like mom and dawn. As for 
the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin her syntax was such 
a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined 
skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor 
to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written 
into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction 
of solecisms, in transposition of phrases, the text was 
largely rewritten on the margin of her proofs. The 
soul of her art was present, but the form was so often 
absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would 
have been hard to say whose cut the garment was of 
in many places. In fact, the proof-reading of the At- 
lantic Monthly was something almost fearfully scrupu- 
lous and perfect. The proofs were first read by the 
under proof-reader in the printing-office; then the 
head reader passed them to me perfectly clean as to 
typography, with his own abundant and most intelli- 
gent comments on the literature ; and then I read them, 

138 




LUCY LARCOM 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

making what changes I chose, and verifying every quo- 
tation, every date, every geographical and biographical 
name, every foreign word to the last accent, every tech- 
nical and scientific term. Where it was possible or 
at all desirable the proof was next submitted to the 
author. When it came back to me, I revised it, accept- 
ing or rejecting the author's judgment according as 
he was entitled by his ability and knowledge or not to 
have them. The proof now went to the printers for 
correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who 
carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read 
it a second time, and it was again corrected. After this 
it was revised in the office and sent to the stereotyper, 
from whom it came to the head reader for a last re- 
vision in the plates. 

It would not do to say how many of the first Ameri- 
can writers owed their correctness in print to the zeal 
of our proof-reading, but I may say that there were 
very few who did not owe something. The wisest 
and ablest were the most patient and grateful, like 
Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it was only the begin- 
ners and the more ignorant who were angry; and al- 
most always the proof-reading editor had his way on 
disputed points. I look back now, with respectful 
amazement at my proficiency in detecting the errors 
of the great as well as the little. I was able to dis- 
cover mistakes even in the classical quotations of the 
deeply lettered Sumner, and I remember, in the ear- 
liest years of my service on the Atlantic, waiting in 
this statesman's study amidst the prints and engrav- 
ings that attested his personal resemblance to Edmund 
Burke, with his proofs in my hand and my heart in my 
mouth, to submit my doubts of his latinity. I forget 
how he received them ; but he was not a very gracious 
person. 

139 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into 
age the inalienable charm of a woman who must have 
been very charming earlier. I mot her onlv at tlie 
Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a 
controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning 
homceoj)athy and allopathy wliich lasted well through 
dinner. After this lapse of time, I cannot tell how 
the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with 
which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something 
very simple, very motherly in her, and something di- 
vinely sincere. She was quite the person to take au 
grand serieux the monstrous imaginations of Lady 
Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to 
make public report of them when she conceived that 
the time had come to do so. 



XI 



In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in 
some others a differentiation of the ^ew England type 
which was not less characteristic. He, like so many 
other Boston men of letters, was of patrician family, 
and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons 
to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suf- 
fering in which he ^^TOught at what is, I suppose, our 
greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and 
sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head- 
aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the 
heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief 
respite for the task which was dear to him. He must 
have been more than a quarter of a century in com- 
pleting it, and in this time, as he once told me, it had 
given him a day-laborer's wages; but of course money 
was the least return he wished from it. I read the ir- 
regularly successive volumes of The Jesuits in North 

140 




J. T. TROWBP.rDGE 



LITERAEY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

America, The Old Regime in Canada, the Wolfe and 
Montcalm, and the others that Avent to make up the whole 
history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our 
acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification 
with the praises of them that I had put in print. We 
entered into relations as contributor and editor, and I 
know that he was pleased Avith my eagerness to get as 
many detachable chapters from the book in hand as 
he could give me for the magazine, but he was of too 
fine a politeness to make this the occasion of his first 
coming to see me. lie had walked out to Cambridge, 
Avhere I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, 
I believe, finally built up his health; that it was un- 
sparing, I can testify from my own share in one of his 
constitutionals in Boston, many years later. 

His experience in laying the groundwork for his 
history, and his researches in making it thorough, were 
such as to have liberated him to the knowledge of other 
manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a Bosto- 
nian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary 
faith as any I knew in that capital of accomplished 
facts. He had lived like an Indian among the wild 
Western tribes ; he consorted with the Canadian archae- 
ologists in their mousings among the colonial archives 
of their fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or 
Paris to study the history of 'Ne\Y France in the origi- 
nal documents; European society was open to him 
everyAvhere ; but he had those limitations which I near- 
ly ahvays found in the Boston men. I remember his 
talking to me of The Rise of Silas Lapham, in a some- 
Avhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting 
his rise as the achicA^ement of social recognition, Avith- 
out much or at all liking it or me for it. I did not 
think it my part to point out that I had supposed the 
rise to be a moral one ; and later I fell under his condem- 

141 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

nation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had 
been guilty of against a well-known ideal in fiction. 
These in fact constituted lese-majesty of romanticism, 
which seemed to be disproportionately dear to a man 
who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of hu- 
man nature as I was in mine. His displeasures pass- 
ed, however, and my last meeting with our greatest 
historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed friendli- 
ness. He came to me during my final year in Boston 
for nothing apparently but to tell me of his liking for 
a book of mine describing boy-life in Southern Ohio 
a half-century ago. He wished to talk about many 
points of this, which he found the same as his own boy- 
life in the neighborhood of Boston ; and we could agree 
that the life of the Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much 
the same everywhere. He had helped himself into my 
apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how 
he had fallen lame. It was the end of his long Avalks, 
I believe, and not long afterwards I had the gi'ief to 
read of his death. I noticed that perhaps through his 
enforced quiet, he had put on weight ; his fine face was 
full; whereas when I first knew him, he was almost 
delicately thin of figure and feature. He was always 
of a distinguished presence, and his face had a great 
distinction. 

It had not the appealing charm I found in 
the face of James Parton, another historian I knew 
earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how much 
his books, once so worthily popular, are now known, 
but I have an abiding sense of their excellence. I 
have not read the Life of Yoltaire, which was the last, 
but all the rest, from the first, I have read, and if there 
are better American biographies than those of Frank- 
lin or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. 
The Greeley and the Burr were younger books, and so 

142 



IITEHARY BOSTON AS 1 KNEW IT 

was the Jackson, and they were not nearly so good; 
but to all the author had imparted the valuable human- 
ity in which he abounded. He was never of the fine 
world of literature, the world that sniffs and sneers, 
and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a 
true artist, and English born as he was, he divined 
American character as few Americans have done. He 
was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to 
be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the 
heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. 
He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and 
I think that no man ever came near him without in 
some measure loving him. To me he was of a most 
winning personality, which his strong, gentle face ex- 
pressed, and a cast in the eye which he could not bring 
to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, endeared. I 
never met him without wishing more of his company, 
for he seldom failed to say something to whatever was 
most humane and most modern in me. Our last meet- 
ing was at I^ewburyport, whither he had long before 
removed from :N'ew York, and where in the serene at- 
mosphere of the ancient Puritan town he found leisure 
and inspiration for his work. He was not then en- 
gaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and 
broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old 
v/armth glowed in him, and made a summer amidst 
the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air without. 
A new light had then lately come into my life, by 
which I saw all things that did not somehow tell for 
human brotherhood dwarfish and ugly, and he listened, 
as I imagined, to what I had to say with the tolerant 
sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking 
those things, and views with a certain amusement the 
zeal of the fresh discoverer. 

There was yet another historian in Boston, whose 
143 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

acquaintance I made later than either Parkman's or 
Parton's, and whose very recent death leaves me with 
the grief of a friend. Xo one, indeed, could meet John 
Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or with- 
out finding a friend in him. He had his likes and his 
dislikes, but he could have had no enmities except for evil 
and meanness. I never knew a man of higher soul, of 
sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of 
character. It cannot wound him now to speak of the 
cruel deformity which came upon him in his boyhood, 
and haunted all his after days with suffering. His 
gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of 
the hunchback, but nothing else in him confessed a 
sense of his affliction, and the resolute activity of his 
mind denied it in every way. Ue was, as is well known, 
a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making 
his studies of military history, and winning recognition 
for almost unique insight and thoroughness in that direc- 
tion, though I believe that when he came to embody the 
results in those extraordinary volumes recording the 
battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in 
some measure. He knew these battles more accurately 
than the generals who fought them, and he was of a like 
proficiency in the European wars from the time of 
N*apoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, 
which I cannot vouch for, that when foreknowledge of 
his affliction, at the outbreak of our civil war, forbade 
him to be a soldier, he became a student of soldiership, 
and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant 
spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain 
that he pursued the study with a devotion which never 
blinded him to the atrocity of war. Some wars he could 
excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed 
wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence. 

The last summer of a score that I had known him, 
144 




SAMUEL BOWLES 



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 

we sat on the veranda of his cottage at York Harbor, 
and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he talked of 
the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest 
for the inquiry which I always found in him, though 
he was then feeling the approaches of the malady which 
was so soon to end all groping in these shadows for 
him. He must have faced the fact with the same 
courage and the same trust with which he faced all facts. 
From the first I found him a deeply religious man, not 
on]}^ in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the more mystical 
meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept 
his youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows 
how young he was in heart, and how he liked to have 
those that were young in years about him. He wished 
to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at 
Y^ork, full of young men and young girls, whose joy of 
>life he made his o^vn, and whose society he preferred 
to his contemporaries'. One could not blame him for 
that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it 
would be a false notion of him to suppose that his sym- 
pathies were solely or chiefly with the happy. In 
every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and good. The 
word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and 
associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and 
whitened to its primitive significance, I should say 
he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I ever knew. 



part fittb 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

in^LSE WHERE we literary folk are apt to be such 
-*--^ a common lot, with tendencies here and there to 
be a shabby lot ; we arrive from all sorts of unexpected 
holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure ; and at 
the best we do so often come up out of the ground ; but 
at Boston we were of ascertained and noted origin, and 
good part of us dropped from the skies. Instead of 
holding horses before the doors of theatres ; or capping 
verses at the plough-tail ; or tramping over Europe with 
nothing but a flute in the pocket ; or walking up to the 
metropolis with no luggage but the ]\[S. of a tragedy; 
or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges ; 
or serving as apothecaries' 'prentices — we were good 
society from the beginning. I think this was none the 
worse for us, and it was vastly the better for good so- 
ciety. 



Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and 
often of so high a lineage, that to be a poet was not only 
to be good society, but almost to be good family. If 
one names over the men who gave Boston her suprem- 
acy in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time 
of the old Puritanic seed-time which was her Augustan 
age, one names the people who were and who had been 
socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the 

146 



OLIVEK WENDELL HOLMES 

Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, 
Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Xorton, Higginson, Dana, 
Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician, in the truest 
and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was 
small, but these were of her first citizens, and their 
primacy, in its w^ay, was of the same quality as that, 
say, of the chief families of Venice. But these names 
can never have the effect for the stranger that they had 
for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt 
whether in Boston they still mean all that they once 
meant, and that their equivalents meant in science, in 
law, in politics. The most famous, if not the greatest 
of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned 
with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though 
by his sympathies and relations he became of it ; and I 
have not mentioned Oliver Wendell Holmes, because 
I think his name would come first into the reader's ^ 
thought with the suggestion of social quality in the 
hcimanities. 

Holmes was of the brahminical c^te which his hu- 
morous recognition invited from its subjectivity in 
the E'ew England consciousness into the light where 
all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he 
was allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most 
intimate ties of life. For a long time, for the whole 
first period of his work, he stood for that alone, its 
tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came ^- 
to stand in his second period, for vastly, for infinitely 
more, and to make friends w^ith the whole race, as few 
men have ever done, it was always, I think, with a 
secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and 
an eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this 
at times, and would mark his several misgivings with 
a humorous sense of the situation. He was essentially 
too kind to be of a narrow Avorld, too human to be fin- 

147 



LITERARY FRIENDS AXD ACQUAINTANCE 

ally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest 
gentility. Ent such limitations as he had were in the 
direction I have hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; 
and I am by no means ready to make a mock of them, 
as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he 
has himself suggested. To value aright the affection 
which the old Eostonian had for Eoston one must con- 
ceive of something like the patriotism of men in the 
times when a man's city was a man's country, some- 
thing Athenian, something Florentine. The war that 
nationalized us liberated this love to the whole country, 
but its first tenderness remained still for Eoston, and 
I suppose a Eostonian still thinks of himself first as a 
Eostonian and then as an American, in a way that no 
N"ew- Yorker could deal with himself. The rich his- 
torical background dignifies and ennobles the intense 
public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of per- 
sonality. 

II 

In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Eos- 
tonians who had given the city her primacy in letters, 
but when I first knew him there was no apparent ground 
for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when 
I visited New England, but when I came to live near 
Eoston, and to begin the many happy years which I 
spent in her fine intellectual air. I found time to run 
in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my 
place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in 
this brief moment with him he brought me to book 
about some vaunting paragraph in the Nation claiming 
the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I 
knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had 
written it myself, when with the kindness he always 
showed me he protested against my position. To tell 

148 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

the truth, I do not think now I had any very good rea- 
sons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would 
stand against his. I could only fall back upon the 
saving clause that this primacy was claimed mainly if 
not wholly for New York in the future. He was will- 
ing to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I 
think he did even this out of politeness rather than con- 
viction, and I believe he had always a sensitiveness 
where Boston was concerned, which could not seem un- 

DR. HOLMES' HANDWRITING 

generous to any generous mind. Whatever lingering 
doubt of me he may have had, with reference to Bos- 
ton, seemed to satisfy itself when several years after- 
wards he happened to speak of a certain character in an 
early novel of mine,^ who was not quite the kind of Bos- 
tonian one could wish to be. The thing came up in 
talk with another person, who had referred to my Bos- 
tonian, and the doctor had apparently made his 
acquaintance in the book, and not liked him. " I un- 
derstood, of course," he said, '^ that he was a Bostonian, 
not tlie Bostonian,'' and I could truthfully answer that 
this was by all means my own understanding too, 

149 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

His fondness for liis citj, \vliich no one could appre- 
ciate better than myself, I hope, often found expression 
in a burlesque excess in his writings, and in his talk 
perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return from 
Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on 
Charles Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while 
I was there a young man came in for the doctor's help 
as a physician, though he looked so very well, and was 
so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts 
whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him 
as the Autocrat. The doctor took him upon his word, 
however, and said he had been so long out of practice 
that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him 
the address of another physician, somewhere near Wash- 
ington Street. ^' And if you don't know where Wash- 
irigton Street is," he said, with a gay burst at a certain 
vagaieness which had come into the young man's face, 
^' you don't know anything." 

We had been talking of Venice, and what life was 
like there, and he made me tell him in some detail. He 
was especially interested in what I had to say of the 
minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, 
the small coins, and the small values adapted to their 
purchase, the intensely retail character, in fact, of 
household provisioning ; and I could see how he pleased 
himself in formulating the theory that the higher a 
civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands 
and supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in 
which you could buy two cents' worth of beef, and a di- 
vergence from this standard was towards barbarism. 

The secret of the man who is universally interesting 
is that he is universally interested, and this was, above 
all, the secret of the charm that Doctor Holmes had for 
every one. Xo doubt he knew it, for what that most 
alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely 

150 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

worth knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief 
pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the consciousness 
which is one of the highest attributes of the highly or- 
ganized man, and he did not care for the consequences 
in your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him 
aright. I remember the delight Henry James, the 
father of the novelist, had in reporting to me the frank- 
ness of the doctor, when he had said to him, " Holmes, 
you are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.'' 
" I am, I am," said the doctor. '^ From the crown of 
my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive, I'm alive !" 
Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish 
he had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with 
you a moment without shedding upon you the light of 
his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and he shone equally 
upon the rich and poor in mind. His gayety of heart 
could not withhold itself from any chance of response, 
but he did wish always to be fully understood, and to 
be liked by those he liked. He gave his liking cau- 
tiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies left 
him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had 
to make up for these with careful circumspection. He 
wished to know the character of the person who made 
overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware that 
his friendship lay close to it ; he wanted to be sure that 
he was a nice person, and though I think he preferred 
social quality in his fellow-man, he did not refuse him- 
self to those who had merely a sweet and wholesome hu- 
manity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt 
of bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he 
did not mind the scent of the new-ploughed earth, or 
even of the barn-yard. I recall his telling me once that 
after two younger brothers-in-letters had called upon 
him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, 
he opened the window; and the verv last time I saw 

351 



LITEKAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

him he remembered at eighty-five the offence he had 
found on his first visit to New York, when a metropol- 
itan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restau- 
rant. 

Ill 

He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the lit- 
tle apartment we had in Boston when we came there in 
1866, and he made this call upon us in due form, 
bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the 
recognition socially. We were then incredibly young, 
much younger than I find people ever are nowadays, 
and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the last 
exquisite value of the fact, wliat it was to have the 
Autocrat come to see us; and I believe he was not dis- 
pleased to perceive this ; he liked to know that you felt 
his quality in every way. That first winter, however, 
I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to 
live in Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at 
Longfellow's, or when I came in to dine at the Fieldses', 
in Boston. It was at certain meetings of the Dante 
Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for 
criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the 
doctor; and his voice was heard at the supper rather 
than at the criticism, for he was no Italianate. He al- 
ways seemed to like a certain tiirn of the talk toward the 
mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground 
of fact this side of the shadows ; when it came to going 
over among them, and laying hold of them with the 
hand of faith, as if they were substance, he was not of 
the excursion. It is well knowTi how fervent, I cannot 
Bay devout, a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law, 
Appleton, was; and when he was at the table too, it 
took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him and the 
Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal 

152 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

controversy upon tlie matter of manifestations. With 
Doctor Holmes the inquiry was inquiry, to the last, I 
believe, and the burden of proof was left to the ghosts 
and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific ; 
he denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to 
be at least as convincing as the natural. 

There was a time in his history when the popular 
ignorance classed him w4th those who were once rudely 
called infidels ; but the world has since gone so fast and 
so far that the mind he was of concerning religious be- 
lief would now be thought religious by a good half of 
the religious world. It is true that he had and always 
kept a grudge against the ancestral Calvinism which 
afflicted his youth; and he was through all rises and 
lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the 
honest belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or 
spoke otherwise than most tolerantly, most tenderly. 
As often as he spoke of religion, and his talk tended to 
it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from 
him, far less a scoff or sneer at religion ; and I am cer- 
tain that this was not merely because he Avould have 
thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he would have 
thought it bad taste ; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to 
be counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have 
been profoundly grieved if he could have known how 
widely this false notion of him once prevailed. It can 
do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets 
of the publishing house the fact that a supposed in- 
fidelity in the tone of his story The Guardian Angel 
cost the Atlantic Monthly many subscribers. I^ow, 
the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly 
agnostic, I fancy ; and long before his death the author 
had outlived the error concerning him. 

It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and 
it would not be too harsh to say that it was the poorest, 

153 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

His novels all belonged to an order of romance which 
was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized 
essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did 
not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too 
proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase 
of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his " medi- 
cated novels." That, indeed, was perhaps what they 
Avere; a faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung 
to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew 
this better than any one else, of course, and if any one 
had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded 
it. But what he did mind was the persistent misin- 
terpretation of his intention in certain quarters where 
he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in- 
stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the suc- 
cessive numbers of his story ; and it was no secret that 
he felt the persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought 
that he had already reached that time in his literary 
life when he was a fact rather than a question, and 
when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his 
acceptance or rejection. But he had to live many 
years yet before he reached this state. When he did 
reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do not 
believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. 
He loved to feel himself out of the fight, with much 
work before him still, but with nothing that could pro- 
voke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all times to 
take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense 
of a mental attitude that misled many. As I have said 
before, he was universally interested, and he studied 
the universe from himself. I do not know how one 
is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no 
existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of 
a make so simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not 
practise the feints some use to conceal that interest in 

154 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

self which, after all, every one knows is only concealed. 
He frankly and joyonsly made himself the starting- 
point in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other 
men, but so far from singling himself out in this, and 
standing apart in it, there never was any one who was 
more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things 
of the soul. 

IV 

In the things of the world, he had fences, and look- 
ed at some people through palings and even over the 
broken bottles on the tops of walls ; and I think he was 
the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think all 
fences are bad, and that God has made enough differ- 
ences between men ; we need not trouble ourselves to mul- 
tiply them. Even behind his fences, however, Holmes 
had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe 
any one came into personal relations with him who did 
not experience this kindness. In that long and de- 
lightful talk I had with him on my return from Ven- 
ice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), 
we spoke of the status of domestics in the Old World, 
and how fraternal the relation of high and low was in 
Italy, while in England, betw^een master and man, it 
seemed without acknowledgment of their common hu- 
manity. '^ Yes," he said, '^ I always felt as if English 
servants expected to be trampled on ; but I can't do that. 
If they want to be trampled on, they must get some 
one else." He thought that our American w^ay was in- 
finitely better ; and I believe that in spite of the fences 
there was always an instinctive impulse with him to 
get upon common ground with his fellow-man. I used 
to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our 
block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence 
for the Autocrat, which could have come from nothing 

155 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

but the kindly terms between them ; if you went to him 
when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you 
so with a sort of implication in his manner that the 
thought of anything else for the time was profanation. 
The good fellow who took him his drives about the 
Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in 
the joke of the doctor's humor, and within the bounds 
of his personal modesty and his functional dignity per- 
mitt-ed himself a smile at the doctor's sallies, when you 
stood talking with him, or listening to him at the car- 
riage-side. 

The civic and social circumstance that a man values 
himself on is commonly no part of his value, and cer- 
tainly no part of his greatness. Kather, it is the very 
thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor Holmes 
appeared in the full measure of his generous person- 
ality to those whordid not and could not appreciatcihis 
circumstance, and not to those who formed it, and who 
from life-long association* were sa dear and comfortable 
to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was 
were those who came from far to pay him their duty, 
or to thank him for some help they had got from his 
books, or to ask his counsel or seek his sympathy. With 
all such he was most winningly tender, most intelli- 
gently patient. I suppose no great author was ever 
more visited by letter and in person than he, or kept 
a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With those 
wdio appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous 
tact, and I fancy in his treatment of all the physician 
native in him bore a characteristic part. No one 
seemed to be denied access to him, but it was after a 
moment of preparation that one was admitted, and 
any one who was at all sensitive must have felt from 
the first moment in his presence that there could be no 
trespassing in point of time. If now and then somQ 

156 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale 
of dismissal that never failed of its work, and that real- 
ly saved the author from the effect of intrusion. He 
w^as not bored because he would not be. 

I transfer at random the impressions of many years 
to my page, and I shall not try to observe a chron- 
ological order in these memories. Vivid among them 
is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the 
publisher, then newly the owner of the Atlantic Month- 
ly, when I had newly become the sole editor. We 
wished to signalize our accession to the control of the 
magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public 
eye, and we thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do 
something again in the manner of the Autocrat and the 
Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had 
passed between him and the management concerning 
our wish, and then Osgood thought that it would be 
right and lit for us to go to him in person. He pro- 
posed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with 
a mind in which he had evidently formulated all his 
thoughts upon the matter. His main question was 
whether at his age of sixty years a man was justified 
in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create 
a new public in the present. He seemed to have look- 
ed the ground over not only with a personal interest in 
the question, but with a keen scientific zest for it as 
something which it Avas delightful to consider in its 
generic relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of 
this inquiry more than consoled him for such pangs 
of misgiving as he must have had in the personal ques- 
tion. As commonly happens in the solution of such 
problems, it was not solved ; he was very willing to take 
our minds upon it, and to incur the risk, if we thought 
it well and were willing to share it. 

We came away rejoicing, and the new series began 
157 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

with the new year following. It was by no means the 
popular success that we had hoped; not because the 
author had not a thousand new things to say, or 
failed to say them with the gust and freshness of his 
immortal youth, but because it was not well to disturb 
a form associated in the public mind with an achieve- 
ment which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat 
of the Breakfast Table that people think, when they 
think of the peculiar species of dramatic essay which 
the author invented, and they think also of the Pro- 
fessor at the BreaJi'fast Table, because he followed so 
soon ; but the Poet at the Brcalifast Table came so long 
after that his advent alienated rather than conciliated 
liking. Very likely, if the Poet had come first he 
would have had no second place in the affections of his 
readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and 
at least one of the poems which graced each instalment 
was one of the finest and greatest that Doctor Holmes 
ever wrote. I mean '' Homesick in Heaven," which 
seems to me not only what I have said, but one of the 
most important, the most profoundly pathetic in the 
language. Indeed, I do not know any other that in 
the same direction goes so far with suggestion so pene- 
trating. 

The other poems were mainly of a cast which did 
not win; the metaphysics in them were too much for 
the human interest, and again there rose a foolish 
clamor of the creeds against him on account of them. 
The great talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the 
eager imagination of the Autocrat could not avail 
in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at the 
Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure 
as Doctor Holmes could come. It certainly was so in 
the magazine which the brilliant success of the first 
had availed to establish in the high place the periodical 

158 



OLIVEB WENDELL HOLMES 

must always hold in the history of American litera- 
ture. Lowell was never tired of saying, when he re- 
curred to the first days of his editorship, that the maga- 
zine could never have gone at all without the Auto- 
crat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon 
Holmes's doing something for the new venture, and he 
was fond of recalling the author's misgivings concern- 
ing his contributions, which later repeated themselves 
with too much reason, though not with the reason that 
was in his own mind. 



He lived twenty-five years after that self-question 
at sixty, and after eighty he continued to prove that 
threescore was not the limit of a man's intellectual 
activity or literary charm. During all that time the 
work he did in mere quantity was the work that a man 
in the prime of life might well have been vain of doing, 
and it was of a quality not less surprising. If I ask- 
ed him with any sort of fair notice I could rely upon 
him always for something for the January number, 
and throughout the year I could count upon him for 
those occasional pieces in which he so easily excelled 
all former writers of occasional verse, and which he 
liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine. 
He had a pride in his promptness with copy, and you 
could always trust his promise. The printer's toe 
never galled the author's kibe in his case ; he wished to 
have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, 
but not overmuch, and he did not keep it long. He 
had really done all his work in the manuscript, which 
came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen, 
in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a 
suggestion of the pleasure he must have had in it. Like 

159 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

all wise contributors, lie was not only patient, but very 
glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-reader 
and editor could accumulate on the margin of his 
proofs, and wlien they were both altogether wrong he 
was still grateful. In one of his poems there was 
some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective pur- 
ism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he 
was in maintaining that in his Parisian time, at least, 
some ladies beyond the Seine said " Eh, b'en," instead 
of " Eh, bicn." He knew that we must be always on 
the lookout for such little matters, and he would not 
wound our ignorance. 

I do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he. 
Of course he would not provoke it, but if it came of 
itself, he would not deny himself the pleasure, as long 
as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to 
recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture 
audiences which in earlier times hesitated applause, 
" Why don^t they give me three times three ? I can 
stand it!'' He himself gave in the generous fulness 
he desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonest- 
ly, though he would spare an open dislike ; but Avhen a 
thing pleased him he know how to say so cordially and 
skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I 
suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and 
faithfully to befriend the beginner than he ; and from 
time to time he would commend something to me that 
he thought worth loooking at, but never insistently. 
In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden 
from his own to the editorial shoulders, he would ask 
that the aspirant might be delicately treated. There 
might be personal reasons for this, but usually his 
kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their 
geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, 
and the hopeless creature for whom he interceded was 

160 



OLIVER WEKDELL HOLMES 

oftener remote from Boston and New England than 
otherwise. 

It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affec- 
tionate, and that it was this which w^as at fault if he 
gave somewhat too much of himself to the celebration 
of the Glass of '29, and all the multitude of Boston oc- 
casions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber 
of his verse, somewhat to the disadvantage of the am- 
ber. If he were asked he could not deny the many 
friendships and fellowships which united in the ask- 
ing ; the immediate reclame from these things was sweet 
to him ; but he loved to comply as much as he loved to be 
praised. In the pleasure he got he could feel himself 
a prophet in his own country, but the country which 
owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too 
much as if it owned him, and did not prize his vatici- 
nations at all their worth. Some polite Bostonians 
knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their 
own detriment from it. 

VI 

After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and 
the delight in it were so wholly there that in ten years 
I had hardly been in as many Boston houses. As I 
have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and 
at Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper, 
which was not often, and somewhat later at the Satur- 
day Club dinners. One parlous time at the publisher's 
I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher 
Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homoeopathy, and 
it required all the tact of the host to lure them away 
from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle waged 
in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well 
through the dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a 
truce w^as called. I need not say which was heterodox, 
L 161 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

o]" that each had a deep and strenuous conscience in the 
matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme 
leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to 
tolerate my own defection from the elder faith in medi- 
cine; and I could not feel his kindness less caressing 
because I knew it a concession to an infirmity. He 
said something like, After all a good physician was the 
great matter; and I eagerly turned his clemency to 
praise of our family doctor. 

He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long 
as his strength permitted, and few of its members 
missed fewer of its meetings. He continued to sit at 
its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz, of 
Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less 
famous, bore him company there among the younger 
men in the fiesh. It must have been very melancholy, 
but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. 
His strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the 
things of it, after so many of his friends were dead. 
The questions which he was w^ont to deal with so fond- 
ly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all 
the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in 
them was increased by the translation to some other 
being of the men who had so often tried with him to 
fathom them here. The last time I was at that table he 
sat alone there among those great memories ; but he was 
as gay as ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor 
gleamed ; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of old ; 
the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy remained. 
To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could 
only have been interesting, as the figure of a man sur- 
viving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the past 
which held so vast a part of all that had constituted 
him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it 
would have been without one emotion of self-pity, such 

162 



OLIVEE WENDELL HOLMES 

as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love of 
knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime. 
For three privileged years I lived all but next-door 
neighbor of Doctor Holmes in that part of Beacon 
Street whither he removed after he left his old home in 
Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather 
often. We were both on the water side, which means 
so much more than the words say, and our library win- 
dows commanded the same general view of the Charles 
rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sun- 
sets, and curving eastward under Long Bridge, through 
shipping that increased onward to the sea. He said that 
you could count fourteen to^vns and villages in. the com- 
pass of that view, with the three conspicuous monu- 
ments accenting the different attractions of it : the tower 
of Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker 
Hill; and in the centre of the picture that bulk of 
Tufts College which he said he expected to greet his 
eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other 
Avorld. But the prospect, though generally the same, 
had certain precious differences for each of us, which I 
have no doubt he valued himself as much upon as I 
did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be 
enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let 
into the bay there apart from the windows, for he was 
apt to make you come and look out of them if you got 
to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant 
study he lived among the books, which seemed to multi- 
ply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from 
floor to ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, 
and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat 
as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were 
impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious 
little contrivances for helping his work, which he liked 
to show yoii; for a time a revolving book-case at the 

163 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that 
came his fountain-pen, which he used with due ob- 
servance of its foimtain principle, though he was tol- 
erant of me when I said I always dipped mine in the 
inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain- 
pen in anywise. After you had gone over these objects 
with him, and perhaps taken a peep at something he 
was examining through his microscope, he sat down at 
one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy- 
chair at the other. His talk was always considerate of 
your wish to be heard, but the person who wished to 
talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his own 
victim, and always the loser. If 3'ou were well advised 
you kept yourself to the question and response which 
manifested your interest in what he was saying, and let 
him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that husky laugh 
he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very 
well when you came in upon him ; then he would name 
his trouble, with a scientific zest and accuracy, and pass 
quickly to other matters. As I have noted, he was 
interested in himself only on the universal side; and 
he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to 
keep it his own ; he suffered a visible disappointment if 
he could not make you think or say you were so and so 
too. The querulous note was not in his most cheerful 
register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; 
though sometimes I have known him touch very lightly 
and currently upon a slight annoyance, or disrelish for 
this or that. As he grew older, he must have had, of 
course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmi- 
ties ; but it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, 
when he became conscious of it, and stop short with an 
abrupt turn to something else. With a real interest, 
which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate 
some little ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, 

164 




OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES IN 1860 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

and I have heard him expatiate with childlike delight 
upon the merits of a new razor he had got: a sort of 
mower, which he conld sweep recklessly over cheek and 
chin without the least danger of cutting himself. The 
last time I saw him he asked me if he had ever shown 
me that miraculous razor ; and I doubt if he quite liked 
my saying I had seen one of the same kind. 

It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chim- 
ney-corner rather as the type of a person having a good 
time than as such a person ; he would rather be up and 
about something, taking down a book, making a note, 
going again to his little windows, and asking you if you 
had seen the crows yet that sometimes alighted on the 
shoals left bare by the ebb-tide behind the house. The 
reader will recall his lovely poem, ^^ My Aviary," which 
deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I 
shared with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used 
to come into our neighbor waters in spring, when the 
ice broke up, and stayed as long as the smallest space 
of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was gra- 
ciously willing I should share in them, and in the cloud 
of gulls which drifted about in the currents of the sea 
and sky there, almost the whole year round. I did not 
pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I 
did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him. 

VII \ 

As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked 
you to respect them, or to be sensible of them. As often 
as I went to see him I was made to wait in the little 
reception-room below, and never shown at once to his 
study. My name would be carried up, and I would 
hear him verifying my presence from the maid through 
the opened door; then there came a cheery cry of wel- 

165 



LITERARY FRIENDS AKD ACQUAINTANCE 

come : ^' Is that yoti ? Come up, come up !" and I found 
him sometimes half-wav down the stairs to meet me. 
He Avould make an excuse for having kept me below a 
moment, and say something about the rule he had to 
observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his 
fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly 
his gentle spirit pervaded the whole house; the Irish 
maid who opened the door had the effect of being a 
neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little 
formality ; she apologized in her turn for tlie reception- 
room; there was certainly nothing trampled upon in 
her manner, but affection and reverence for him whose 
gate she guarded, with something like the sentiment she 
would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, 
but nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's 
peculiar merits. 

The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had 
lately knocked at my o^\'n door was al)0ut to enter. I 
met the master of the house on the holding of the stairs 
outside his study, and he led me in for the few mo- 
ments we could spend together. He spoke of the 
shadow so near, and said he supposed there could be no 
hope, but he did not refuse the cheer I offered him from 
my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something 
that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath 
of laughter, so potent is the wont of a lifetime, though 
his eyes were full of tears, and his voice broke with his 
words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will under- 
stand this best. 

It was during the few years of our Beacon Street 
neighborhood that he spent those hundred days abroad 
in his last visit to England and France. He was full 
of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity 
gave me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at 
first hand. He whimsically pleased himself most w^th 

166 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

his Derby-day experiences, and enjoyed contrasting 
the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty 
years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of 
the Derby won; nothing else in England seemed to 
have moved him so much, though all that royalties, 
dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had 
been done. Of certain things that happened to him, 
cliaracteristic of the English, and interesting to him 
in their relation to himself through his character 
of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but 
lie has said what he chose to the public about them, 
and I have no right to say more. The thing that 
most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to 
have been described in one of the London papers as 
quite deaf; and I could truly say to him that I had 
never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him accused of 
it before. ^^ Oh, yes," he said, ^^ I am a little hard of 
hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness." 

He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age 
tjiat make themselves painfully or inconveniently evi- 
dent. He carried his slight figure erect, and until his 
latest years his step was quick and sure. Once he 
spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of 
something that was said, and '" They will slwink, you 
•know," he added, as if he were not at all concerned in 
the fact himself. If you met him in the street, you 
encountered a spare, carefidly dressed old gentleman, 
with a clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified 
by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile brows; 
well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat, 
latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he 
did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at 
such times I think it was kind to spare his years the 
fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am 
glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the 

167 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

same vagueness, the same dimness ; but after the mo- 
ment he needed to make sure of you, he was as vivid 
as ever in his life. Tie made me think of a bed of 
embers on which the ashes have tliinly gathered, and 
Avhich, when these are breathed away, sparkles and 
tinkles keenlj^ up with all the freshness of a newly 
kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his age, 
and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches 
interested him ; if he was going, he liked to know just 
how and when he was going. Once he spoke of his 
lasting strength in terms of imaginative Immor: he 
was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, 
that it seemed to him he was not like an old man so 
much as a lusty infant which struggles against having 
the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the notion 
of this, witli that impersonal relish, which seemed to mc 
singularly characteristic of the self-consciousness so 
marked in him. I never heard one lugubrious w^ord 
from him in regard to liis years. He liked your sym- 
pathy on all groimds where he could have it self-re- 
spectfully, but he was a most manly spirit, and he would 
not liave had it even as a type of the universal decay. 
Possibly he wouhl liavc been interested to have you 
share in that analysis of himself which he was always 
making, if such a thing could have been. 

He had not much patience with the immanly craving 
for s^anpathy in others, and chiefly in our literary craft, 
which is somewhat ignobly given to it, though he was 
patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has 
said it in print, that unless a man could show a good 
reason for writing verse, it was rather against him, and 
a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion 
was something he had reached after dealing with in- 
numerable small poets who sought the light in him with 
verses that no editor would admit to print. Yet of mor- 

168 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

bidness lie was often very tender; he knew it to be 
disease, something that must be scientifically rather 
than ethically treated. He was in the same degree kind 
to any sensitiveness, for he was himself as sensitive as 
he was manly, and he was most delicately sensitive to 
any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a 
dinner with him, wliere he was in some sort my host, in 
a company of people whom he had not seen me with 
before, and he made a point of acquainting me with 
each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of 
them already; the proof of his thoughtfulness was 
precious, and I was sorry when I had to disappoint it 
by confessing a previous knowledge. 

VIII 

I had three memorable meetings with him not very 
long before he died : one a year before, and the other two 
within a few months of the end. The first of these was 
at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose 
hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all 
went out to meet him, v/hen he drove up in his open car- 
riage, with the little sunshade in his hand, which he 
took with him for protection against the heat, and also, 
a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment 
after he arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to 
each of us. Beside the gifted hostess, there was the 
most charming of all the American essayists, and the 
Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at 
home with the people who greeted him. There was no 
interval needed for fanning away the ashes ; he tinkled 
up before he entered the house, and at the table he was 
as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I 
ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and 
we had made him ])elieve that there was nothing ego- 

169 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

tistic in his taking the word, or turning it in illustration 
from himself upon universal matters. I spoke among 
other things of some humble ruins on the road to 
Gloucester, which gave the way-side a very aged look; 
the tumbled foundation-stones of poor bits of houses, 
and '' Ah," he said, '' the cellar and the well V He 
added, to the company generally, " Do you know what 
I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any 
others, in a certain direction ?" and he began to repeat 
stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier 
poems, until he came to the closing couplet. Eut I will 
give them in full, because in going to look them up I 
have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his 
voice again in every fondly accented syllable : 

** Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his foot. 
The lowliest home where human hearts have beat? 
The hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain, 
A century's showery torrents wash in vain ; 
Its starving orchard where the thistle blows, 
And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows; 
Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen 
Next an old roof, or where a roof has been ; 
Its knot-grass, plantain, — all the social weeds, 
Man's mute companions following where he leads; 
Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling 

heads. 
Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden beds; 
Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb; 
Its roses breathing of the olden time; 
All the poor shows the curious idler sees. 
As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees, 
Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell, 
Save last life's icrecks — the cellar and the well!" 

The poet's chaunting voice rose witli a triumphant 
swell in the climax, and " There," he said, ^' isn't it so ? 
The cellar and the well — they can't be thro-wn down or 
burnt up; they are the human monuments that last 
longest, and defy decav." He reioiced openlv in the 

170 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

sympathy that recognized with him the divination of a 
most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated the 
last couplet again at onr entreaty, glad to be entreated 
for it. I do not know whether all will agree with him 
concerning the relative importance of the lines, but I 
think all must feel the exquisite beauty of the picture to 
which they give the final touch. 

He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that 
day, but his pleasure in this gave me the most pleasure, 
and I recall the passage distinctly out of the dimness 
that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger 
men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the 
past and present, as representative of modern feeling 
and thinking, and himself as no longer contemporary. 
We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we pro- 
tested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and 
minds; and indeed there were none of his generation 
who had lived more widely into ours. He was not a 
prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the 
wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. Llis note was 
heard rather amid the sweet security of streets, but it 
was always for a finer and gentler civility. He imag- 
ined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory of 
life will be known by his name. He was not con- 
structive; he was essentially observant, and in this he 
showed the scientific nature. He made his reader 
known to himself, first in the little, and then in the 
larger things. From first to last he Avas a censor, but 
a most winning and delightful censor, who could make 
us feel that our faults were other people's, and who was 
not wont 

" To bait his homilies with his brother worms." 

At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far 
as Keform was concerned, or perhaps reformers, who 

171 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

are so often tedious and ridiculous; but he seemed to 
get a now heart with the new mind which came to him 
when he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the 
light mocker of former days became the serious and 
compassionate thinker, to whom most truly nothing 
that was human was alien. His readers trusted and 
loved him; few men liave ever written so intimately 
with so much dignity, and perhaps none has so en- 
deared himself by saying just tlie thing for his reader 
that his reader could not say for himself. He sought 
the universal through himself in others, and he found 
to his delight and tlieirs that tlie most imiversal thing 
was often, if not always, the most personal thing. 

In my later meetings with liim I was struck more 
and more by his gentleness. I believe that men are apt 
to grow gentler as they grow older, unless they are of 
the curmudgeon type, wdiich rusts and crusts with age, 
but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly 
marked. He seemed to shrink from all things that 
could provoke controversy, or even difference; he 
waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather 
sought the things that lie could agree with you upon. 
In the last talk I had with him he appeared to have 
no grudge left, except for the puritanic orthodoxy in 
which he had been bred as a child. This he was not 
able to forgive, though its tradition was interwoven 
with what w^as tenderest and dearest in his recollections 
of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I said I 
sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man 
towards life who had not been reared in its avv^ful 
shadow, say an English Churchman, or a Continental 
Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that 
he did not believe such a man could at all enter into 
our feelings; puritanism, he seemed to think, made an 
essential and ineradicable difference. I do not believe 

172 




THE WATER-SIDE AT BEVERLY 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

lie had any of that false sentiment which attributes vir- 
tue of character to severity of creed, while it owns the 
creed to be wrong. 

He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his 
contemporaries. lie spoke of them frankly, but with 
an appreciative rather than a censorious criticism. Of 
Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him 
I had been writing about him, and he seemed to me 
a man without error, that he could think of but one 
error in him, and that was an error of taste, of al- 
most merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time 
that he talked of Lowell, after his death, and told me 
that Lowell once in the fever of his antislavery apos- 
tolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a matter 
of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so 
much at heart. Afterwards Lowell WTote again, own- 
ing himself wrong in his appeal, which he had come to 
recognize as invasive. ^^ He was ten years younger 
than I," said the doctor. 

I found him that day I speak of in his house at Bev- 
erly Farms, where he had a pleasant study in a corner 
by the porch, and he met me with all the cheeriness of 
old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken 
up by the labor of preparing something that might be 
read at some commemorative meeting, and had suffered 
from finding first that he could not write something 
specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an old 
poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the 
failing powers of age. But otherwise he was still 
yoimg, intellectually; that is, there was no failure of 
interest in intellectual things, especially literary things. 
Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he 
asked me if I had seen it, and made some joke about his 
having had the good luck to read it, and have it lying 
by him a few days before when the author called. I do 

173 



LiTEEAEY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

not know wlicthcr he schooled himself against an old 
man's tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know 
that he seldom did so. That morning, however, he 
made several excursions into it, and told me that his 
youthful satire of the Spectre Pig had been provoked 
by a poem of the eldest Dana's, where a phantom 
horse had been seriously employed, with an effect of 
anticlimax whicli he liad found irresistible. Another 
foray was to recall the op})ression and depression of his 
early religious associations, and to speak with moving 
tenderness of his father, whose hard doctrine as a min- 
ister was without effect U])on his own kindly nature. 

In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, 
upon an occasion wlien he divined that some word from 
him would be more than commonly dear, he recurred to 
tlie feeling he then expressed : '' Fifty-six years ago — 
more than half a century — I lost my own father, his age 
being seventy-three years. As I have reached that peri- 
od of life, passed it, and now left it far behind, my 
recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boy- 
hood and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light 
than it came to me in my middle decades. I have often 
wished of late years that I could tell him how I 
cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happi- 
ness of saying all I long to tell him on the other side of 
that thin partition which I love to think is all that di- 
vides us." 

Men are never long together without speaking of 
women, and I said how inevitably men's lives ended 
where they began, in the keeping of women, and their 
strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their 
care. I had not finished before I was made to fc?l that 
I was poaching, and ^^ Yes," said the owner of the pre- 
serve, " I have spoken of that," and he went on to tell 
me just wliere. He was not going to have me suppose 

174 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 

I had invented those notions, and I could not do less 
than own that I must have found them in his book, and 
forgotten it. 

He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at 
once soft and fresh, of that lovely coast, and of his 
drives up and down the coimtry roads. Sometimes this 
lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two 
habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered^ 
if they failed, that he might not fail of his drive in any 
fair weather. His cottage was not immediately on the 
sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a sense of the 
sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region, 
and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere 
beyond the reach of its salt breath. 

I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept 
my eye on the clock in frequent glances. I saw that he 
followed me in one of these, and I said that I knew 
what his hours were, and I was watching so that I 
might go away in time, and then he sweetly protested. 
Did I like that chair I was sitting in ? It was a gift 
to him, and he said who gave it, with a pleasure in the 
fact that was very charming, as if he liked the associa- 
tion of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to 
excuse the formal look of his bookcases, which were 
filled with sets, and presented some phalanxes of fiction 
in rather severe array. 

When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being 
able to find my w^ay readily to tlie station, and he told 
me how to go, and what turns to take, as if he liked 
realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk 
much of late years, and I fancy he found much the 
same pleasure in letting his imagination make this ex- 
cursion to the station with me that he would have found 
in actually going. 

I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or 
175 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

two later he drove up by our hotel in Magnolia towards 
the cottage where his secretary was lodging. He saw 
us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to 
make us rejoice with him at having finally got that com- 
memorative poem off his mind. lie made a jest of the 
trouble it had cost him, even some sleeplessness, and 
said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all bright- 
ness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel 
his mood, through what Avas common to us all; and I 
am glad that this last impression of him is so one with 
the first I ever had, and with that which every reader 
receives from his Avork. 

That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is 
thronghout the very expression of himself. I think it 
is a pity if an author disappoints even the unreasonable 
expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited to 
lovo him ; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could 
inflict this disappointment. Certainly he could disap- 
point no reasonal)le expectation, no intelligent expecta- 
tion. What he wrote, that he was, and every one felt 
this wdio met him. He has therefore not died, as some 
men die, the rcTuote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrill- 
ingly alive in every page of his books. The quantity 
of his literature is not great, but the quality is very 
surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From 
the beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in 
his successive consciousnesses. Perhaps every one docs 
this, but his Avork gives the impression of an uncommon 
continuity, in spite of its being the effect of a later and 
an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made tlie 
later an astonishing revelation to those who thought 
they knew him. 



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 



IX 

It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any 
judgment of his work. I have loved it, as I loved him, 
with a sense of its limitations which is by no means a 
censure of its excellences. He was not a man who 
cared to transcend ; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, 
the constancy of shores. If he put to sea, he kept in 
sight of land, like the ancient navigators. He did not 
discover new continents ; and I will own that I, for my 
part, should not ha^^e liked to sail with Columbus. I 
think one can safely affirm that as great and as useful 
men stayed behind, and found an America of the mind 
without stirring from their thresholds. 
M 



part Siitb 
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

WE had expected to stay in Boston only until wo 
could find a house in Old Cambridge. This 
was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the 
ancient to\\Ti had not yet quickened its scholarly pace 
to the modern step. Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the 
impulse of expansion was not yet visibly felt any- 
where ; the enormous material growth that followed the 
civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses 
to be let were few, and such as there were fell either be- 
low our pride or rose above our purse. I wish I might 
tell how at last we bought a house ; we had no money, but 
we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink 
from the story of their constant faith in a financial fut- 
ure which we sometimes doubted, and who backed their 
credulity with their credit. It is sufficient for the pres- 
ent record, which professes to be strictly literary, to 
notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we 
went out to Cambridge and beffan to live in a house 
which we owned in fee if not in deed, and which was 
none the less valuable for being covered with mort- 
gages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort 
which is readily imagined by the Anglo-American gen- 
ius for ugliness, but which it is not so easy to impart a 
just conception of. A trim hedge of arbor-vitae tried to 
hide it from the world in front, and a tall board fence 
behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too 

178 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

well planted) with pears, grapes, and currants, and 
there was a small open space which I lost no time in 
digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us 
were the open fields ; on the other a brief line of neigh- 
bor-houses ; across the street before us was a grove of 
stately oaks, which I never could persuade Aldrich had 
painted leaves on them in the fall. We were really in a 
poor suburb of a suburb ; but such is the fascination of 
ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged 
property, that we calculated the latitude and longitude 
of the whole earth from the spot we called ours. In our 
walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we 
might have been willing to live; only, we said, they 
were too far off. We even prized the architecture of 
our little box, though we had but so lately lived in a 
Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were 
not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. 
Positive beauty we could not have honestly said we 
thought our cottage had as a whole, though we might 
have held out for something of the kind in the brackets 
of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly 
content with it ; and with life in Cambridge, as it began 
to open itself to us, we were infinitely more than con- 
tent. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully 
simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its 
parallel. 



It was the moment before the old American customs 
had been changed by European influences among people 
of easier circumstances ; and in Cambridge society kept 
what was best of its village traditions, and chose to 
keep them in the full knowledge of different things. 
ISTearly every one had been abroad; and nearly every 
one had acquired the taste for olives without losing a 

179 



IJTFRAKY FKJyXDS AXD ACQUADTTAXCZ 

rdish fcH- lunve f^Tices: duav^ the intdleetiial life 
diere ins an entire demociitfy. and I do nol bdkffe 
ikit sinee dv capitalistic em began these was ever a 
eonmnmity in wiudi maner eoonted iixr ksB. There 
was little sImpw of iriiat moner could bay; I remember 
bat one pnrate carriage (natnralhr, a pnUisher's) ; and 
Aere was not one livery, exBepC a lirery in the larger 
sense bept by tbe stableman Pike, who made ns pay 
BOW a qoaiter and now a balf dcdlar for a seat in hk 
carri^es, noeoiding as be lost or gathered courage for 
the diazgeL We thon^it bim extMtkmate, and we most- 
ly walked thiDvg^ snow and mnd of mmMrmg depdi and 
tiki^neas. 

The render will imagine how aeeeptaUe this ciicam- 
stance was to a yovng literary man beginning life with 
a fidhr mortgaged boose and a salary of untried elas- 
ticity. If there vere distinetiaBs made in Caml^dge 
they were not against litoatnre^ and we f omid onr- 
sdf^es in ihe midst of a charmii^ society, indifferent, 
afUMLreth -, to all questions hot those of die hig^ber 
edncation which comes so largely by nature. That is to 
saty, in the Cambrid^ of diat day (and, I dare say, of 
this) a mind cnhiTated in some sort was f««p«t^«l^ and 
after that came orfl wiimm^tk and the wiDii^neBB and 
ability to be ^reeable and interestiiig; hot the qne»- 
of riches or porerty did not ento'. Eren the qnes- 
of famify, which is of so great eoneem in Xew 
^^ ^ land, was in abeyance^ Perhapa it was taken for 
gn n rte d that erety one in Old Cambridge aodety most 
be of good famih-y or he coold not be ihae; j^erbxpB bis 
mere resdence tacitfy eanoUed him; certainly his ac- 
ceptance was an informal patent of gentility. To my 
mind, the stroetnie of society was ahiMiat ideal, ml 
until we hare a perfectly socialized condition of things 
I do BOt hdiere we diall eter hare a more perfect sod- 

IfcO, 



THE WHITE UK- LOXG: 

ety. THe izi^-- - . 

can aris-^ :: _ i 

nawed fr . :- :~ 

nee in i::.^:^- ..- :— -_; ~_i _ I :^i: 
tion of than hy saying tLi: :lr "" 
collese magnsTe 5«remed to be _ 
the poorest. 

In thru=e dav5. -1- zil^z. ~1 ^ : 
splendor to L _ 

forget ^yme •:! :_r__ _ :^ 
Louis Agassiz, Traiicis -J _ 

Jnn.. John Fiske. Dr. Asa Grsy. 
.Jameses, i-izher and s<his, Lo':^eIL L 
Eliot y .non. Dr. John G. Palfrev. 



grear that Mr. Br^* Hir-r : _ - 

tlope, justly said, after Kstei^ _ ^ tarsal 

of them. " Why. ' - • - - : „ -^ tnr 

front p:»rch any^ _ _ > 

volnmer!" Everybody had Trrirte: f, 

or a poem : or was in the jwrocess or exj<\: 

it, and donbtless thoee wih^^ - - .^^ -, 

have greater diSculty in elu _ -. 

these gifted folk each came to see us 

home among them: and my home '- 

on this side and on that side o: 

living and the dead, which invisioiy p^^sse^ :_: _ 

the streets of the cities of men. 



We had the whole smnmer for ^le e:^lontion of 
Cambridge befoie society remmed frcoa tJie moimtabfcs 
and the sea-shore, and it was not till October timt I saw 

ISl 



LITERARY FRIENDS AKD ACQUAINTANCE 

Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first 
came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and thongh 
Nahant was no longer so far awav, now, as it was then, 
I did not think of seeking him ont even when we went 
for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It 
seems strange that I cannot recall just when and where 
T saw him, but early after his return to Cambridge I 
had a message from him asking me to come to a meet- 
ing of the Dante Club at Craigie House. 

Longfellow was that winter (18C6-7) revising his 
translation of the Paradiso, and the Dante Club was the 
circle of Italianate friends and scholars whom he in- 
vited to follow liim and criticize his work from the 
original, while he read his version aloud. Those who 
were most constantly present were Lowell and Professor 
Norton, but from time to time others came in, and we 
seldom sat down at the nine-o'clock supper that fol- 
lowed the reading of the canto in less number than ten 
or twelve. 

The criticism, especially from the accomplished 
Danteists I have named, was frank and frequent. I be- 
lieve they neither of them quite agreed with Longfellow 
as to the form of version he had chosen, but waiving 
that, the question was how perfectly he had done his 
work upon the given lines. I myself, w^ith whatever 
right, great or little, I may have to an opinion, believe 
thoroughly in Longfellow's plan. WTien I read his 
version my sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, 
but my admiration for his fidelity to Dante otherwise 
is immeasurable. I remember with equal admiration 
the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, 
who scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or 
phrase that gave them pause, and did not let it pass 
till all the reasons and facts had been considered. Some- 
times, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their cen- 

182 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

sure, but for the most part, when he was of another 
mind, he held to his mind, and the passage had to go as 
he said. I make a little haste to say that in all the meet- 
ings of the Club, during a whole winter of Wednesday 
evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an 
Italian Dante with the rest, ventured upon one sug- 
gestion only. This was kindly, even seriously, con- 
sidered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could not 
do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suf- 
fered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing. I 
can see him now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets 
on the round table before him, and over at me, growing 
consciously smaller and smaller, like something through 
a reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in 
front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly 
noble head had a dignity peculiar to him. 

All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more 
or less bad and good, for there was something as simple 
in the physiognomy as in the nature of the man. His 
head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his 
hair long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, 
but mildly leonine, as the old painters conceived the 
lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the ex-monk of 
Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, 
came in for supper, after the reading was over, and he 
was leonine too, but of a fierceness that contrasted finely 
with Longfellow's mildness. I remember the poet's 
asking him something about the punishment of im- 
paling, in Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical 
gleam of his fiery eyes, " Unhappily, it is obsolete." I 
dare say he was not so leonine, either, as he looked. 

When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, 
w^ith a mellow resonant murmur, like the note of some 
deep-throated horn. His voice was very lulling in 
quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early 

183 



LITEKAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

effect with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous arm- 
chair at the corner of the fire, and who drowsed audibly 
in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The poet had a 
fat terrier who wished ahvays to be present at the 
meetings of the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at 
the same moment with that dear old scholar, so that 
when they began to make themselves heard in concert, 
one could not tell which it was that most took our 
thoughts from the text of the Paradiso. When the duet 
opened, Longfellow would look up with an arch recog- 
nition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of 
the canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and 
lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard 
anything amiss. 

Ill 

In that elect company I was silent, partly because I 
was conscious of my youthful inadequacy, and partly 
because I preferred to listen. But Longfellow always 
behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying 
and delightful things, and from time to time he ad- 
dressed himself to me, so that I should not feel left out. 
He did not talk much himself, and I recall nothing 
that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and 
simply, without the least touch of pose, and with no 
intention of effect, but with something that I must call 
quality for want of a better word; so that at a table 
where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agas- 
siz beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gayety, which 
seemed to dim all those vivider luminaries. While he 
spoke you did not miss Fields's story or Tom Apple- 
ton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. i!^orton^ 
with his unequalled intuitions. 

The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the 
host carved, or a haunch of venison, or some braces of 

184 



THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW 

grouse, or a platter of quails, with a deep bowl of salad, 
and the sympathetic companionship of those elect vin- 
tages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with 
the inspiration of affection. We usually began with 
oysters, and when some one who was expected did not 
come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate, 
as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Low- 
ell remarked, with the cayenne poised above his blue- 
points, '' It's astonishing how fond these fellows are 
of pepper.'' 

The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was per- 
haps not wide enough awake to repress an " Ah ?" of 
deep interest in this fact of natural history, and Lowell 
was provoked to go on. " Yes, I've dropped a red pep- 
per pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then 
taken them out in a solid mass, clinging to it like a 
swarm of bees to their queen." 

^^ Is it possible ?" cried the old friend ; and then 
Longfellow intervened to save him from worse, and 
turned the talk. 

I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, 
for I find that only a few fragments of it have caught in 
my memory, and that the sieve which should have kept 
the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I re- 
member once Doctor Uolmes's talking of the physician 
as the true seer, whose awful gift it was to behold with 
the fatal second sight of science the shroud gathering 
to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in per- 
fect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered 
days. The thought may have been suggested by some 
of the toys of superstition which intellectual people like 
to play with. 

I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's 
brother-in-law, Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, 
even when he disputed the most strenuously with the 

185 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

unbelieving Antocrat. But he really was in earnest 
abont it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his 
doctrine, like some clerics when they are in the safe 
company of other clerics. He told me once of having 
recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable 
seance, where the souls of the departed outdid them- 
selves in the athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond 
of over there, throwing large stones across the room, 
moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and setting 
them atwirl under the cliandelier. " And now," he de- 
manded, '' what do you say to that?'' " Well, Mr. Ap- 
pleton," Agassiz answered, to Appleton's infinite de- 
light, '' I say that it did not happen." 

One night they began to speak at the Dante supper 
of the unhappy man whose crime is a red stain in the 
Cambridge annals, and one and another recalled their 
impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly 
witli a retroactive sense that they had all felt some- 
thing uncanny in him, but, apropos of the deep salad- 
bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow remember- 
ed a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some 
chemical in such a dish and held his head over it, with 
a handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted 
above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale light, 
took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged 
by the neck. 

Another night the talk wandered to the visit which 
an English author (now with God) paid America at 
the height of a popularity long since toppled to the 
ground, with many another. He was in very good 
humor with our whole continent, and at Longfellow's 
table he found the champagne even surprisingly fine. 
^' But," he said to his host, who now told the story, " it 
cawn't be genuine, you know!" 

Many years afterwards this author revisited our 
186 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

shores, and I dined with him at Longfellow's, where 
he was anxions to constitute himself a gnest during 
his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was 
equally anxious that he should not do so, and he took 
a harmless pleasure in outmanoeuvring him. He seized 
a chance to speak with me alone, and plotted to de- 
liver him over to me without apparent unkindness, 
when the latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, 
and begged me to walk him to Harvard Square and put 
him aboard. " Put him aboard, and don't leave him 
till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get 
off." 

These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of 
the eyebrows, and a pursing of the mouth, in an anx- 
iety not altogether burlesque. He knew himself the 
prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his 
hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps 
Mr. Norton has somewhere told how, when he asked 
if a certain person who had been outstaying his time 
was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with 
angelic patience, ^' Yes ; but then you know I have 
been bored so often !" 

There was one fatal Englishman Vvdiom I shared 
with him during the great part of a season: a poor 
soul, not without gifts, but always ready for more, 
especially if they took the form of meat and drink. 
He had brought letters from one of the best English- 
men alive, who withdrew them too late to save his 
American friends from the sad consequences of wel- 
coming him. So he established himself impregnably 
in a Boston club, and came out every day to dine with 
Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his return 
from Valiant in October and continuing far into De- 
cember. That was the year of the great horse-dis- 
temper, when the plague disabled the transportation 

187 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the 
suburb and the city on the street railways. " I did 
think/' Longfellow pathetically lamented, ^^ that when 
the horse-cars stopped running, I should have a little 
respite from L., hut lie walks out." 

In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to 
advise Avith me concerning some poems L. liad offered 
to the Atlantic Monthly, and after we had desperately 
read them together he said, with inspiration, " I think 
tliese things are more adapted to music than the mag- 
azine," and this seemed so good a notion that when L. 
came to know their fate from me, I answered, confi- 
dently, " I think they are rather more adapted to mu- 
sic." 

He calmly asked, " Why ?" and as this was an 
exigency Avhich Longfellow had not forecast for me, I 
was caught in it without hope of escape. I really do 
not know what I said, but I know that I did not take 
the poems, such was vaj literary conscience in those 
days; I am afraid I should be weaker now. 

IV 

The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation 
from the severity of their toils on criticism, and I will 
not pretend that their table-talk was of that seriousness 
which duller wits might have given themselves up to. 
The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial 
person, was always welcome, and I never knew of the 
enforcement of the rule I heard of, that if you came 
in without question on the Club nights, you were a 
guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get 
in. 

Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Apple- 
ton proposed that Longfellow should show us his v^ne- 

188 



a:HE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

cellar. He took up the candle burning on the table 
for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the 
beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as 
Washington's headquarters while he w^as in Cam- 
bridge, and as the home of Longfellow for so many 
years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the 
darkness, bringing into relief the massive piers of 
brick, and the solid walls of stone, which gave the cel- 
lar the effect of a casemate in some fortress, and leav- 
ing the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. 
This basement w^as a work of the days when men built 
more heavily if not more substantially than now, but 
I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine-cellar was 
of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly 
cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had 
any more charm than the shelves of a library : it is the 
inside of bottles and of books that makes its appeal. 
The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury, 
which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. 
Longfellow once spoke of certain old love-letters whicli 
dropped down on the basement stairs from some 
place overhead; and there w^as the fable or the fact of 
a subterranean passage under the street from Craigie 
House to the old Batchelder House, which I relate 
to these letters with no authority I can allege. But in 
Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was 
buried in the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at 
her head and a slave at her feet. 

" Dust is in her beautiful eyes," 

and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their 
time over those love-letters, I will leave the reader to 
say. The fortunes of her Tory family fell with those 
of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days a 
prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a 

189 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

weekly enlargement on Sundays, when the law could 
not reach him. It is known how" the place took Long- 
fellow's fancy when he first came to be professor in 
Harvard, and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress 
Craigie there, long before he became its o^vner. The 
house is square, with Longfellow's study where he read 
and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier li- 
brary behind it ; on the left is the drawing-room, with 
the dining-room in its rear ; from its square hall climbs 
a beautiful stairway with twisted banisters, and a tall 
clock in their angle. 

The study where the Dante Club met, and where 
I mostly saw Longfellow, was a plain, pleasant room, 
with broad panelling in white painted pine ; in the 
centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden 
with books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner 
by the window was a high desk which he sometimes 
stood at to Avrite. In this room Washington held his 
councils and transacted his business with all comers; 
in the chamber overhead he slept. I do not think 
Longfellow associated the place much with him, and I 
never heard him speak of Washington in relation to 
it except once, w^hen he told me with peculiar relish 
what he called the true version of a pious story con- 
cerning the aide-de-camp who blundered in upon him 
while he knelt in prayer. The father of his coun- 
try rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then 
resumed his devotions. ^' He rebuked him," said 
Longfellow, lifting his brows and making rings round 
the pupils of his eyes, '^ by throwing his scabbard at 
his head." 

All the front windows of Craigie House look 
out over the open fields across the Charles, which is 
now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The poet used 
ito be amused with the popular superstition that he was 

190 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the 
price of lots, while all he wanted was to keep a feat- 
ure of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty elms 
drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn bil- 
lowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge 
along the fence. There was a terrace part way down 
this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was 
set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed 
always to have been there. Long verandas stretched 
on either side of the mansion; and behind was an old- 
fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box 
after a design of the poet's own. Longfellow had a 
ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which he used to 
tell with an artful reserve of the catastrophe. He was 
coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the 
garden he was startled by a white figure swaying be- 
fore him. But he knew that the only way was to ad- 
vance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and was 
suddenly caught under the throat — by the clothes-line 
with a long night-gown on it. 

Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the 
Dante Club that I heard him tell this story. The even- 
ings were sometimes mornings before the reluctant 
break-up came, but they were never half long enough 
for me. I have given no idea of the high reasoning 
of vital things which I must often have heard at that 
table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof that I 
did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to 
what it shall bind and what it shall loose, and I should 
entreat mine in vain for record of those meetings other 
than what I have given. Perhaps it would be well, 
in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the 
social intercourse of great wits must be, for me to in- 
vent some ennobling and elevating passages of conver- 
sation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to do it for 

191 



LlTERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

the sake of iny own repute as a serious and adequate 
witness. But I am rather helpless in the matter; I 
must set doA\Ti what I remember, and surely if I can 
remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could 
live or die by, it is something to recall how, when 
a certain potent cheese was passing, he leaned over to 
gaze at it, and asked: '' Does it kick? Does it kick?" 
No strain of high ])oetic thinking remains to me from 
Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his 
passive adventure one night going home late, when a 
man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence upon 
the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst 
fright of his life, disappeared peaceably into the dark- 
ness. To be sure, there was one most memorable sup- 
per, when he read the '^ Bigelow Paper '' he had fin- 
ished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verso 
with the beauty of his voice. There lingers yet in my 
sense his very tone in giving the last line of the passage 
lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in those 
dark hours of Johnson's time seemed to have been 

" Butchered to make a blind man's holiday." 

The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that 
finest quality which spoken praise always lacks; and 
I suppose that I could not give a just notion of these 
Dante Club evenings mthout imparting the effect of 
such silences. This I could not hopefully undertake 
to do; but I am tempted to some effort of the kind by 
my remembrance of Longfellow's old friend George 
Washington Greene, who often came up from his home 
in Rhode Island, to be at those sessions, and Avho was 
a most interesting and amiable fact of those delicate 
silences. A full half of his earlier life had been pass- 
ed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved 
each other in their youth with an affection which the 

192 



THE WHITE MK. LONGFELLOW 

poet was constant to in his age, after many vicissi- 
tudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his nature. Greene 
was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle, 
suave, very suave, sooth as creamy curds, cultivated 
in the elegancies of literary taste, and with a certain 
meek abeyance. I think I never heard him speak, 
in all those evenings, except when Longfellow address- 
ed him, though he must have had the Dante scholar- 
ship for an occasional criticism. It was at more re- 
cent dinners, where I met him with the Longfellow 
family alone, that he broke now and then into a quo- 
tation from some of the modern Italian poets he knew 
by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse 
with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching 
Florentine rhythm. jSTow and then at these times he 
brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly smelling 
of civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture. He 
liked to speak of Goldoni and of ^ota, of l!^iccolini and 
Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came 
to America, of the Revolution and his grandfather, 
the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he 
wrote (and I read) in three volumes. He worshipped 
Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they 
lived, but towards the last of his visits at Craigie 
House it had a pathos for the witness which I should 
grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering para- 
lytic, and he clung tremulously to Longfellow's arm 
in going out to dinner, where even the modern Italian 
poets were silent upon his lips. When we rose from 
table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took 
him upon his arm again for their return to the study. 
He was of lighter metal than most other members of 
the Dante Club, and he was not of their immediate in- 
timacy, living away from Cambridge, as he did, and 
I shared his silence in their presence with full sym- 
N 193 



LiTEHARY FRIIlNDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

pathy. I was by far the youngest of their number, and 
I cannot yet quite make out why I was of it at all. But 
at every moment I was as sensible of my good fortune 
as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all , 
men living I most honored, and it seemed to be impos-HI 
sible that I at my age should be so perfectly fulfilling 
the dream of my life in their company. Often the 
nights were very cold, and as I returned home from 
Craigie House to the carpenter's box on Sacramento 
Street, a mile or two away, I was as if soul-borne 
through the air by my pride and joy, wdiile the frozen 
blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet 
stumbling along the middle of the road. I still think 
that was the richest moment of my life, and I look back 
at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, 
which I would most like to live over again — if I must 
live any. 

The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were 
transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then 
completing his version of the Vita Nuova. This has 
always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art 
than Longfellow's translation of the Commedia, In 
fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting 
to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate 
skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not 
know whether ]\Lr. Norton has satisfied himself better 
in his prose version of the Commedia than in this 
of the Vila Nuova, but I do not believe he could 
have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhvmed his 
sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he might have done 
this if he had chosen. lie has always pretended that it 
was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the 
right hands. 



THE WHITE MB. LONGFELLOW 



After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box 
on Sacramento Street, and removed to a larger house 
near Harvard Square, and in the immediate neighbor- 
hood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across 
that old garden behind his house, through an opening 
in the high board fence which enclosed it, and I saw 
him oftener than ever, though the meetings of the 
Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, 
Lowell had asked him, with fond regret in his jest, 
'' Longfellow, why don't you do that Indian poem in 
forty thousand verses?" The demand but feebly ex- 
pressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the 
Indian poem existed only by the challenger's invention. 
Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these 
great times I am tempted to mention an incident 
poignant witli tragical associations. The first night after 
Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the 
chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the 
gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Long- 
fellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands 
do^vn and bore them out. iSTo one could speak for 
thinking what he must be thinking of when the inef- 
fable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told 
me that a little wliile before Mrs. Longfellow's death 
he was driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who 
said he trembled to look at it, for those who lived there 
had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the 
changes which must come to ,them, could fail to be for 
the worse. 

I did not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and 
I shall not say that his presence bore record of it ex- 
cept in my fancy. He may always have had that look 

195 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate 
can do, and henceforth could possess himself of what 
was left of life in peace. He could never have been a 
man of the flowing ease that makes all comers at home ; 
some people complained of a certain gene in him; and 
he had a reserve with strangers, which never quite lost 
itself in the abandon of friendship, as Lowell's did. 
He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever 
imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not 
believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could tres- 
pass upon. In the years when I began to know him, 
his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with 
it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a per- 
fect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, 
which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness 
of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of 
spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought 
lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him 
coming doAvn a Cambridge street; you felt that the en- 
counter made you a part of literary history, and set 
you apart with him for the moment from the poor and 
mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beat- 
ified if not beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking 
spot on the planet outside of New York. Y^ou could 
meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the 
same provision-man as he ; and Longfellow remained as 
constant to his tradesi3eople as to any other friends. He 
rather liked to bring his proofs back to the printer's 
himself, and we often found ourselves together at the 
University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to 
be printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow 
seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think 
of him- in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art 
with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and 
scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite ver- 

196 



THE WHITE MK. LONGFELLOW 

tical, and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor 
left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of 
using a soft pencil on printing paper, though common- 
ly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in 
shape, and between the verses was always the exact 
space of half an inch. I have a good many of his poems 
written in this fashion, but whether they were the first 
drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards 
the last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in 
his own hand, but they were always signed in autograph. 

I once asked him if he were not a great deal inter- 
rupted, and he said, with a faint sigh, N^ot more than 
was good for him, he fancied ; if it were not for the in- 
terruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend 
to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as 
Lowell was; he had not, indeed, the childish associa- 
tions of the younger poet with the Cambridge neigh- 
borhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure 
except on the east veranda of his house, though I was 
told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some 
other things Longfellow was more European than 
American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said 
quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting 
on and off one's overcoat and overshoes. 

I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was 
denied access to him, and there must have been times 
when he was overrun with volunteer visitors; but I 
never heard him complain of them. He was very 
charitable in the immediate sort which Christ seems to 
have meant; but he had his preferences, humorously 
owned, among beggars. He liked the German beggars 
least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most 
savoir-faire; in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cam- 
bridge. He was pleased with the accounts I could give 
him of the love and honor I had known for him in 

197 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian 
admirer, addressed to '' Mr. Greatest Poet Longfel- 
low," which he said was the very most amusing super- 
scription he had ever seen. 

It is known that the King of Italy oifered Longfel- 
low the cross of San Lazzaro, which is the Italian lit- 
erary decoration. It came through the good offices of 
my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a 
deputy in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some rea- 
son I cannot remember, I had put in correspondence 
with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected, 
and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly 
for the gentleman who had procured him the impos- 
sible distinction. He showed me the pretty collar and 
cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No 
man was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious 
than he, but he said, firmly, " Of course, as a republi- 
can and a Protestant, I can't accept a decoration from 
a Catholic prince." His decision was from his con- 
science, and I think that all Americans who think duly 
about it will approv^e his decision. 

VI 

Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did 
not refuse, and I recall what zest he had in his elec- 
tion to the Arcadian Academy, which had made him a 
sliepliord of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, 
of " Olimipico something." But I fancy his sweetest 
pleasure in his vast renown came from his popular 
recognition everywhere. Few were the lands, few the 
lansjuajres he was unknown to: he showed me a version 
of the '' Psalm of Life " in Chinese. Apparently even 
the poor lost autograph-seeker was not denied by his 
universal kindness ; I know that he kept a store of auto- 

J?8 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

graphs ready written on small squares of paper for all 
who applied by letter or in person; he said it was no 
trouble ; but perhaps he was to be excused for refusing 
the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which she 
wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a 
lunch party. 

Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their 
pleasure, apparently, and with perfect impunity. Some- 
times he got a little fun, very, very kindly, out of their 
excuses and reasons ; and the Englishman who came to 
see him because there were no ruins to visit in America 
was no fable, as I can testify from the poet himself. 
But he had no prejudice against Englishmen, and even 
at a certain time when the coarse-handed British criti- 
cism began to blame his delicate art for the universal 
acceptance of his verse, and to try to sneer him into 
the rank of inferior poets, he was without rancor for 
the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not under- 
stand rudeness ; he was too finely framed for that ; he 
could know it only as Swedenborg's most celestial angels 
perceived evil, as something distressful, angular. The 
ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse 
criticism made him distrust criticism, and the dis- 
comfort which mistaken or blundering praise gives 
probably made him shy of all criticism. He said 
that in his early life as an author he used to seek 
out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his - 
latter days he read only those that happened to fall 
in his way; these he cut out and amused his leisure 
by putting together in scrap - books. He was re- 
luctant to make any criticism of other poets; I do not 
remember ever to have heard him make one; and his 
writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or con- 
tempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for right- 
eous judgments, l^o doubt he had his resentments, but 

199. 



LITEEAKY FEIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

he hushed them in his heart, which he did not suffer 
them to embitter. While Poe Avas writing of ^^ Long- 
fellow and other Plagiarists/' Longfellow was helping 
to keep Poe alive by the loans which always made them- 
selves gifts in Poe's case. He very, very rarely spoke 
of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances 
which he did not fail to share with all who live. 

He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle 
beyond all mere gentlemanliness. But it would have 
been a great mistake to mistake his mildness for soft- 
ness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it 
was braced with the New England conscience he was 
born to. If he did not find it well to assert himself, he 
was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one of the 
fine things told of him was his resenting some cen- 
sures of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old 
pro-slavery times: he said to the gentlemen present 
that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their 
company if they continued to assail him. 

But he sj^oke almost as rarely of his friends as of 
himself. He liked the large, impersonal topics which 
could be dealt with on their human side, and involved 
characters rather than individuals. This was rather 
strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our 
instances from the environment. It was not the only 
thing he was strange in there ; he was not to that man- 
ner born ; he lacked the final intimacies which can come 
only of birth and lifelong association, and which make 
the men of the Boston breed seem exclusive when they 
least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends who 
were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. 
He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I 
never heard him mention Hawthorne ; I never heard 
him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his reti- 
cence about his contemporaries was largely due to his 

200 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

reluctance from criticism: he was tlie finest artist of 
tliem all, and if he praised he must have praised with 
the reservations of an honest man. Of younger writers 
he was willing enough to speak. jSTo new contributor 
made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and 
sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave 
me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for the 
first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and 
how he tasted the fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its 
wild new fragrance. He admired the skill of some of 
the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one 
in working out an intricate character, and said modest- 
ly that he could never have done that sort of thing him- 
self. It was entirely safe to invite his judgment when 
in doubt, for he never suffered it to become aggressive, 
or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must 
often have been urged upon him. 

Longfellow had a house at ^ahant where he went 
every summer for more than quarter of a century. 
He found the slight transition change enough from 
Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take 
him beyond the range of the friends and strangers 
whose company he liked. Agassiz was there, and Ap- 
pleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the 
tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour 
after they reached Boston. His cottage was very plain 
and simple, but was rich in the sight of the illimitable 
sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the foot of its gar- 
den, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the inde- 
fatigable tides. As he grew older and feebler he ceased 
to go to E^ahant ; he remained the whole year round at 
Cambridge; he professed to like the summer which he 
said warmed him through there, better than the cold 
spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant. 

The hospitality which was constant at either house 
201 



LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

was not merely of the worldly sort. Longfellow loved 
good cheer; he tasted history and poetry in a precious 
wine; and he liked people wdio were acquainted with 
manners and men, and brought the air of capitals with 
them. But often the man who dined with LongfelloAV 
was the man who needed a dinner; and from w4iat I 
have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that 
board, I am sure that such a man could never have felt 
himself the least honored guest. The poet's heart was 
open to all the homelessness of the world ; and I remem- 
ber how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his 
poem of " The Ch allonge,'' then a new poem, and said 
how I had been touched by the fancy of 

" The poverty-stricken millions 

Who challenge our wine and bread. 
And impeach ua all as traitors. 
Both the living and the dead," 

his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, " Yes, 
I often think of those things," He had thought of them 
in the days of the slave, when he had taken his place 
with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as long 
as he lived he continued of the party which had freed 
the slave. He did not often speak of politics, but when 
the movement of some of the best Republicans away 
from their party began, he said that he could not see the 
wisdom of their course. But this was said without 
censure or criticism of them, and so far as I know he 
never permitted himself anything like denunciation of 
those who in any wise differed from him. On a matter 
of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak 
for him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon 
anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of 
the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ. He did 
not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few 
of his circle were church-goers. Once he said some- 

202 



THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW 

thing very vague and uncertain concerning the doctrine 
of another life when I affirmed my hope of it, to the 
effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh 
that so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with 
him. 

VII 

When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he 
had written the things that made his fame, and that it 
will probably rest upon : " Evangeline/' ^' Hiawatha/' 
and the '' Courtship of Miles Standish " were by that 
time old stories. But during the eighteen years that I 
knew him he produced the best of his minor poems, the 
greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his lyrics. His 
art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it 
never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own 
aloud, but in three or four cases he read to me poems 
he had just finished, as if to give himself the pleasure 
of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of another. 
The hexameter piece, ^' Elizabeth," in the third part of 
" Tales of a Wayside Inn," was one of these, and he 
liked my liking its rhythmical form, which I believed 
one of the measures best adapted to the English speech, 
and which he had used himself with so much pleasure 
and success. 

About this time he was greatly interested in the slight 
experiments I was beginning to make in dramatic form, 
and he said that if he were himself a young man he 
should write altogether for the stage; he thought the 
drama had a greater future with us. Tie was pleased 
when a popular singer wished to produce his " Masque 
of Pandora," with music, and he was patient when i1 
failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the 
late Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was 
one of the fine traits of liis generous character, had 

203 



LITERARr FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

taken my play of '^ A Counterfeit Presentment," and 
came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could 
not apparently have been more zealous for its popular 
acceptance if it had been his own work, lie invited 
himself to one of the rehearsals with mo, and he sat 
with me on the stage through the four acts with a forti- 
tude which I still wonder at, and with the keenest zest 
for all the details of the performance. No finer testi- 
mony to the love and honor which all kinds of people 
had for him could have been given than that shown by 
the actors and employees of the theatre, high and low. 
They thronged tlie scenery, those wlio were not upon the 
stage, and at the edge of every wing were faces peering 
round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adora- 
tion, intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every 
step in going out, and made to put his name to the pho- 
tographs of himself whicli his worshippers produced 
from their persons. 

He came to the first night of the piece, and when it 
seemed to be finding favor with the public, he leaned 
forward out of his line to nod and smile at the author; 
when they had the author up, it was the sweetest flat- 
tery of the applause which abused his fondness that 
Longfellow clapped first and loudest. 

Where once he had given his kindness he could not 
again withhold it, and he was anxious no fact should be 
interpreted as withdrawal. When the Emperor Dom 
Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfel- 
low, came to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with 
the poet, who had expected to ofl^er him some such hos- 
pitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and as if 
eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, " I 
wanted to ask you to dinner with the Emperor, but he 
not only sent word he was coming, he named liis fellow- 
guests!" I answered that though I should probably 

204 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

never come so near dining with an emperor again, I 
prized his wish to ask me much more than the chance 
I had missed ; and w^ith this mj great and good friend 
seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak 
too confidently of onr relation. lie was truly the 
friend of all men, but I had certainly the advantage 
of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as the 
pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street 
and after I had built my own house on Concord Ave- 
nue ; and I suppose he found my youthful informality 
convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his 
old friend Greene came to visit him, and then we had 
an Italian time together, with more or less repetition 
in our talk, of what we had said before of Italian poe- 
try and Italian character. One day there came a note 
from him saying, in effect, '^ Salvini is coming out to 
dine with me to-morrow night, and I want you to come 
too. There will be no one else but Greene and myself, 
and we will have an Italian dinner." 

Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for 
that night, and this invitation put me in great misery. 
I must keep my engagement, but how could I bear to 
miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow's table on terms 
like these ? We consulted at home together and ques- 
tioned whether I might not rush into Boston, seek out 
my host there, possess him of the facts, and frankly 
throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought 
struck us: Go to Longfellow, and submit the case to 
him! I went, and he entered with delicate sympathy 
into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large 
view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should 
run even a remote risk of wounding my friend's sus- 
ceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a very good time, but 
I still feel that I missed the best time of my life, and 
that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere. 

205 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way 
that one heard from him few of those experiences of 
the distinguished man in contact with the undistin- 
guished, w^hich he must have had so abundantly. But 
he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident 
that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacco- 
nist's, where a certain brand of cigars was recommend- 
ed to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. " Ah, then 
I must have some of them ; and I will ask you to send 
me a box," said Longfellow, and he wrote down his 
name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the 
smile of a worsted champion, and said, ^' Well, I guess 
you had me, that time." At a funeral a mourner 
wished to open conversation, and by way of suggesting 
a theme of common interest, bciran, " Youvc buried, 
I believe ?" 

Sometimes people w^re shown by the poet through 
Craigie House Avho had no knowledge of it except that 
it had been Washington's headquarters. Of course 
Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cam- 
bridge. He was daily in the streets, while his health 
endured, and as he kept no carriage, he was often to 
be met in the horse-cars, which were such common 
ground in Cambridge that they were often like small 
invited parties of friends when they left Harvard 
Square, so that you expected the gentlemen to jump 
up and ask the ladies whether they would have chicken 
salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so 
far as to vote regularly, and he voted with his party, 
trusting it for a general regard to the public welfare. 

I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as 
the scholar seems always to be, from the sequestered 
habit of his life ; but I think Longfellow was incapable 
of marking any difference between himself and them. 
I never heard from him anything that was de haut en 

206 



THE WHITE MK. LONGFELLOW 

has, when he spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where 
there was a good deal of contempt for the less lettered, 
and we liked to smile though we did not like to sneer, 
and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and 
Longfellow's house were free of all that. Whatever 
his feeling may have been towards other sorts and con- 
ditions of men, his effect was of an entire democracy. 
He was always the most unassuming person in any 
company, and at some large public dinners where I saw 
him I found him patient of the greater attention that 
more public men paid themselves and one another. 
He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet 
at dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whit- 
tier, who was absent. He disliked after-dinner speak- 
ing, and made conditions for his own exemption from 
it. 

VIII 

Once your friend, Longfellow was always your 
friend ; he would not think evil of you, and if he knew 
evil of you, he would be the last of all that knew it to 
judge you for it. This may have been from the im- 
personal habit of his mind, but I believe it was also 
the effect of principle, for he would do what he could 
to arrest the delivery of judgment from others, and 
would soften the sentences passed in his presence. 
^NTaturally this brought him under some condemnation 
with those of a severer cast; and I have heard him 
criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his con- 
stancy to some who were not quite so true to them- 
selves, perhaps. But this leniency of Longfellow's 
was what constituted him great as well as good, for it 
is not our wisdom that censures others. As for his 
goodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean 
to say that he had no faults, or that there were no bet- 

207 



LITEKAKY FKIENDS AXD ACQUAINTANCE 

ter men, but only to give the witness of my knowledge 
concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been his 
intimate ; such a thing was not possible in my case for 
quite apparent reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow 
was capable of intimacy in the sense we mostly attach 
to the word. Something more of egotism than I ever 
found in him must go to the making of any intimacy 
which did not come from the tenderest affections of his 
heart. But as a man shows himself to those often with 
him, and in his noted relations with other men, he 
showed himself without blame. All men that I have 
known, besides, have had some foible (it often endear- 
ed them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness, 
or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the sug- 
gestion of any. l^o breath of evil ever touched his 
name ; he went in and out among his fellow-men with- 
out the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing 
I ever heard said of him was that he had gene, and this 
was said by one of those difficult Cambridge men who 
would have found ghie in a celestial angel. Some- 
thing that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when he 
was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, 
comes nearer suggesting Longfellow than all my talk. 
The Norsemen, in the days of their stormy and reluc- 
tant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as the 
White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, " Give 
my love to the White Mr. Longfellow." 

A good many years before Longfellow's death he 
began to be sleepless, and he suffered greatly. He 
said to me once that he felt as if he were going about 
with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night 
through he would not be aware of having slept. " But," 
he would add, with his heavenly patience, ^' I always 
get a good deal of rest from lying down so long." I 
cannot say whether tliese conditions persisted, or how 

208 



! \V 



x\ 






*^^ 



~-^^ 



^-^ 






'. ^-^^^ 



--^^^%L 











THE WASHINGTON ELM, CAMBRIDGE 



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 

much his insomnia had to do with his breaking health; 
three or four years before the end came, we left Cam- 
bridge for a house farther in the country, and I saw 
him less frequently than before. He did not allow 
our meetings to cease; he asked me to dinner from 
time to time, as if to keep them up, but it could not 
be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of 
coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cam- 
bridge, but it was with an effort not visible in the days 
when he could end one of his brief w^alks at our house 
on Concord Avenue ; he never came but he left our 
house more luminous for his having been there. Once 
he came to supper there to meet Garfield (an old fam- 
ily friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was suffer- 
ing from a heavy cold, he v/ould not scant us in his 
stay. I had some very bad sherry which he drank 
with the serenity of a martyr, and I shudder to this 
day to think what his kindness must have cost him. 
He told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield 
matched it with the story of an umbrella ghost who 
sheltered a friend of his through a midnight storm, 
but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who 
passed his hand through him at one point in the effort 
to take his arm. 

After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to 
be treated for a long sickness, which had nearly been 
my last, and when I could get about I returned the 
visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did 
not find him, and I never saw him again in life. I 
went into Boston to finish the winter of 1881-2, and 
from time to time I heard that the poet was failing in 
health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car 
journey I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had 
knocked once at his door, the friendly door that had 
so often opened to his welcome, and stood with the 
o 209 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

knocker in my hand when tlie door was suddenly set 
ajar, and a maid showed her face Avet with tears. 
"How is Mr. Longfellow ?'' I palpitated, and Avith a 
burst of grief she answered, '' Oh, the poor gentleman 
has just d(>parted !" 1 turned away as if from a help- 
less intrusion at a death-bed. 

At the services held in the house before the obsequies 
at the cemetery, I saw the poet for the last time, where 

" Dead he lay anioiij^ his books," 

in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails 
to bring serenity to all, and I Avill not pretend that 
there was a peculiar peacefulness in Longfellow's no- 
ble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign 
as it had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler 
aspect in going out of the Avorld than he had always 
worn in it; he had not to wait for death to dignify 
it with " the peace of God." All who were left of 
his old Cambridge were present, and among those who 
had come farther was Emerson. He went up to the 
bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his 
elbows held in either hand, stood with his head patheti- 
cally fallen forward, looking down at the dead face. 
Those Avho knew how his memory was a mere blank, 
with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming 
and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling 
to remember wdio it was lay there before him ; and for 
me the electly simple Avords confessing his failure A\dll 
ahvays be pathetic Avith his remembered aspect : '^ The 
gentleman Ave liaA^e just been burying," he said, to the 
friend AA^ho had come Avith him, " Avas a SAveet and beau- 
tiful soul ; but I forget his name." 

I had the privilege and honor of looking OA^er the 
unprinted poems LongfelloAV left behind him, and of 
helping to decide Avhich of them should be published. 

210 



THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW 

There were not many of them, and some of these few 
were quite fragmentary. I gave my voice for the pub- 
lication of all that had any sort of completeness, for 
in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the 
grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two 
men only who felt the claim of their gift to the very 
best that the most patient skill could give its utterance : 
one was Hawthorne and the other was Longfellow. I 
shall not undertake to say which was the greater artist 
of these two; but I am sure that every one who has 
studied it must feel with me that the art of Longfellow 
held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and 
that it equalled the art of any other poet of his time. 
It knew w^hen to give itself, and more and more it knew 
when to withhold itself. 

What Longfellow's place in literature will be, I 
shall not offer to say; that is Time's affair, not mine; 
but I am sure that with Tennyson and Browning he 
fully shared in the expression of an age which more 
completely than any former age got itself said by its 
poets. 



Part Seventh 

STUDIES OF LOWELL 

T HAVE already spoken of my earliest meetings with 
-■- Lowell at Cambrid/^e when I came to j^ew Eng- 
land on a literary pilgrimage from the West in 1860. 
I saw him more and more after I went to live in 
Cambridge in 18GC; and I now wish to record what I 
knew of him during the years that passed between this 
date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try 
to paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others 
who knew him, I shall only claim that so he looked to 
me, at this moment and at that. If I do not keep my- 
self quite out of the picture, what painter ever did ? 



It was in the summer of 18G5 that I came home 
from my consular post at Venice ; and two weeks after 
I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell at Elm- 
wood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought 
him from Italy. The bronze lobster whose back open- 
ed and disclosed an inkpot and a sand-box was quite 
ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell 
thought otherwise he never did anything to let me 
know it. He put the thing in the middle of his writ- 
ing-table (he nearly always wrote on a pasteboard pad 
resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long 
as I knew the place — a matter of twenty-five years; 

212 




JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL AT FORTY 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

but in all that time I suppose the inkpot continued as 
dry as the sand-box. 

My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fer- 
vid in Cambridge as it can well be anywhere, and I 
still have a sense of his study windows lifted to the 
summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers cry- 
ing in at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. 
Other people went away from Cambridge in the sum- 
mer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell always 
stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his 
home and for his town. I must have found him there 
in the afternoon, and he must have made me sup with 
him (dinner was at two o'clock) and then go with him 
for a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have 
some one help him idle the time away, and keep him as 
long as possible from his work ; and no doubt I was im- 
personally serving his turn in this way, aside from any 
pleasure he might have had in my company as some one 
he had always been kind to, and as a fresh arrival from 
the Italy dear to us both. 

He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easy- 
chair, invited my shy youth to all the ease it was capa- 
ble of in his presence. It was not much ; I loved him, 
and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me, 
but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and 
closer and stricter civilization than my own, an un- 
broken tradition, a more authoritative status. His de- 
mocracv was more of the head and mine more of the 
heart, and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. 
But his nature was so noble and his reason so tolerant 
that whenever in our long acquaintance I found it 
well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, 
he admitted my right of insurrection, and never resent- 
ed the outbreak. I disliked to differ with him, and 
perhaps he subtly felt this so much that he would not 

213 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed 
with inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not 
been quite just, he would take punishment for his 
error, with a contrition that was sometimes humorous 
and always touching. 

Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn, with 
Italy, and he was interested but not much encouraged 
by what I could tell him of the feeling in Venice 
against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like 
scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for 
the Italians in literature, and he confessed an interest 
in the facts treated which in the retrospect, I am aware, 
was more tolerant than participant of my enthusiasm. 
That was always LowelFs attitude towards the opinions 
of people he liked, when he could not go their lengths 
with them, and nothing was more characteristic of his 
affectionate nature and his just intelligence. He was a 
man of the most strenuous convictions, but he loved 
many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed 
with, and he suffered even prejudices counter to his 
own if they were not ignoble. In the whimsicalities 
of others he delighted as much as in his ovm. 



II 

Our associations with Italy held over until the next 
day, when after breakfast he went with me towards 
Boston as far as " the village '' : for so he liked to speak 
of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when 
wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from 
his life-long home at Elmwood. We stood on the plat- 
form of the horse-car together, and when I objected to 
his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed 
that the Italian usage of each paying for himself was 
the politer way. He would not commit himself about 

214 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

my returning to Venice (for I bad not given up my^ 
place, yet, and was away on leave), but be intimated 
bis distrust of tbe flattering conditions of life abroad. 
He said it was cbarming to be treated da signore, but 
be seemed to doubt wbetber it was well ; and in tbis as 
in all otber tbings be sbowed bis final fealty to tbe 
American ideal. 

It was tbat serious and great moment after tbe suc- 
cessful close of tbe civil war wben tbe republican con- 
sciousness was more robust in us tban ever before or 
since ; but I cannot recall any reference to tbe bistorical 
interest of tbe time in Lowell's talk. It bad been all 
about literature and about travel; and now witb tbe 
suggestion of tbe word village it began to be a little 
about bis youtb. I bave said before bow reluctant 
be was to let bis youtb go from bim ; and perbaps tbe 
toucli witb my juniority bad made bim realize bow near 
be was to fifty, and set bim tbinking of tbe past wbicb 
bad sorroAvs in it to age bim beyond bis years. He- 
would never speak of tbese, tbougb be often spoke of tbe- 
past. He told once of having been a brief journey wben 
be was six years old, witb bis f atber, and of driving up) 
to tbe gate of Elmwood in tbe evening, and bis fatber- 
saying, '^ Ab, tbis is a pleasant place ! I wonder wbo.^ 
lives bere — wliat little boy ?" At another time bej 
pointed out a certain window in bis study, and said be- 
could see himself standing by it wben he could only 
get bis chin on the window-sill. His memories of the* 
bouse, and of everything belonging to it, were very 
tender; but he could laugh over an escapade of bis 
youtb wben be helped bis fellow-students pull down his 
father's fences, in tbe pure zeal of good-comradeship^. 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

111 

'^[j fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most 
of the winter of 1805--G writing in the office of The Na- 
tion. I contributed several sketches of Italian travel to 
that paper; and one of these brought me a precious 
letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he 
said he had read without the least notion who had writ- 
ten it, and he wanted me to feel the full value of such 
an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did 
not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical 
verses of mine which he had read in another place ; and 
I believe it was then tliat he bade me " sweat the Heine 
out of " me, " as men sweat the mercury out of their 
bones." 

When I was asked to be assistant editor of the At- 
lantic Monthly, and came on to Boston to talk the mat- 
ter over with the publishers, I went out to Cambridge 
and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take 
the position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New 
Y^ork on Tlie Nation) ; and at the same time he seemed 
to have it on his heart to say that he had recommended 
some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought 
of me. 

He was most cordial, but after I came to live in 
Cambridge (where the magazine was printed, and T 
could more conveniently look over the proofs), he did 
not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite 
to have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Nor- 
ton's, for one of the Dante readings, and he took no 
special notice of me till I happened to say something 
that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous 
snub. I was speaking of a paper in the magazine on 
the " Claudian Emissary," and I demanded (no doubt a 
little too airily) something like '' Who in the world 

216 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

ever heard of the Claudian Emissary ?'' " You are in 
Cambridge, Mr. Howells/' Lowell answered, and laugh- 
ed at my confusion. Having put me down, he seemed 
to soften towards me, and at parting he said, with a 
light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes, 
'" Good-night, fellow-townsman.'' *^ I hardly knew we 
were fellow-townsmen," I returned. He liked that, 
apparently, and said he had been meaning to call upon 
me, and that he w^as coming very soon. 

He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a 
week of any kind of weather passed but he mounted the 
steps to the door of the ugly little house in which I 
lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk. 
I'hese walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went 
abroad for a winter in the early seventies. They took 
us all over Cambridge, which he knew and loved every 
inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, un- 
handsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish 
neighborhoods, and fraying off into marshes and salt 
meadows. He liked to indulge an excess of admiration 
for the local landscape, and though I never heard him 
profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the 
finest Alpine scenery, I could well believe he would do 
so imder provocation of a fit listener's surprise. He had 
always so much of the boy in him that he liked to tease 
the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and 
he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of 
affectation, or any little exuberance of manner gave him 
the chance; when he once came to fetch me, and the 
young mistress of the house entered with a certain ex- 
cessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced 
towards her, with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage 
— which made her laugh. When he had given us his 
heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger brother 
and sister, or like his own children. He included our 

217 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

children in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness 
for them as if it were something that had come back 
to him from his own youth. I think he had also a sort 
of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of 
the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, 
from which pleasing effects in literature and civiliza- 
tion were wrought. He liked giving the children books, 
and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he masked 
as a fairy prince ; and as long as he lived he remembered 
kis early kindness for them. 

IV 

In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the 
talking, and from his talk then and at other times there 
remains to me an impression of his growing conserva- 
tism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent 
its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be 
witness of its increasing tendency towards the negative 
sort. He was quite past the storm and stress of his anti- 
slavery age ; with the close of the war Avhich had broken 
for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached 
the age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard 
him express doubt of what he had helped to do, or regret 
for what he had done ; but I know that he viewed with 
critical anxiety what other men were doing w^ith the 
accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what 
one may call reluctance from the political situation, and 
turned him back towards those civic and social defences 
which he had once seemed willing to abandon. I do not 
mean that he lost faith in democracy ; this faith he con- 
stantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he 
certainly had no longer any faith in insubordination as 
a means of grace. He preached a quite Socratic rever- 
ence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I 

218 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the 
American custom-house, and spoke lightly of smug- 
gling as not an evil in itself, and perhaps even a right 
under our vexatious tariff, he would not have it, but 
held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of- 
fence. This was not the logic that would have justified 
the attitude of the antislavery men towards the fugitive 
slave act; but it was in accord with Lowell's feeling 
about John Brown, whom he honored while always con- 
demning his violation of law ; and it was in the line of 
all his later thinking. In this, he wished you to agree 
with him, or at least he wished to make you ; but he did 
not wish you to be more of his mind than he was him- 
self. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I 
confessed a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now 
think it) for the increasing presence of that race among 
us, but this did not please him; and I am sure that 
whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, 
he would not have had it less than it had been the 
refuge and opportunity of the poor of any race or color. 
Yet he would not have had it this alone. There was a 
line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the 
printed version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, 
as saying too bitterly his disappointment with his 
country. Writing at the distance of Europe, and with 
iVmerica in the perspective wdiich the alien environ- 
ment clouded, he spoke of her as '^ The Land of Broken 
Promise." It was a splendid reproach, but perhaps too 
dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and yet it had 
the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, 
to the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it ex- 
pressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure 
it would now express that of many who love their coun- 
try most among us. It is well to hold one's country to 
her promises, and if there are any who think she is for- 

219 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

getting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point 
of bitter accusation. I do not suppose it was the " com- 
mon man " of Lincoln's dream that Lowell thought 
America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested 
ho could be tender of the common man's hopes in her; 
but he was impeaching in that blotted line her sincerity 
with the uncommon man : the man who had expected of 
her a constancy to the ideals of her 3-outh and to the 
high martyr-moods of the war which had given an un- 
guarded and bewildering freedom to a race of slaves. 
He was thinking of tlie sliame of our municipal corrup- 
tions, the debased quality of our national statesman- 
ship, the decadence of our whole civic tone, rather than 
of the increasing disabilities of the hard-working pour, 
though his heart when he thouglit of them was with 
them, too, as it was in '' the time when the slave would 
not let him sleep." 

lie spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because 
their political and social associations were so knit up 
with the saddest and tenderest personal memories, which 
it was still anguish to toucli. Not only was he 

" — not of the race 
That hawk, their sorrows in the market place," 

but SO far as my witness went he shrank from mention 
of them. I do not remember hearing him speak of the 
young wife who influenced him so potently at the most 
vital moment, and turned him from his whole scholarly 
and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned champion- 
ship of the oppressed; and he never spoke of the chil- 
dren he had lost. I recall but one allusion to the days 
when he was fighting the antislavery battle along the 
whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his 
Irish servant's disgust in having to wait upon a negro 
whom he had asked to his table. 

He was rather severe in his notions of the subordina- 
220 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

tion his domestics owed him. They were ^^ to do as they 
were bid/' and yet he had a tenderness for such as had 
been any time with him, which was wounded when once 
a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached 
him in a certain transaction. He complained of that 
with a simple grief for the man's indelicacy after so 
many favors from him, rather than with any resent- 
ment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theo- 
retic; his actual behavior was of the gentle considera- 
tion common among Americans of good breeding, and 
that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suf- 
fered to exceed him in shows of mutual politeness. 
Often when the maid was about weightier matters, he 
came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming me 
with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he 
said, " Siete il benvenuto/' or used some other Italian 
phrase, which put me at ease with him in the region 
where we were most at home together. 

Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it 
w^as he found to make him wish for my company, which 
he presently insisted upon having once a week at din- 
ner. After the meal we turned into his study where 
we sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and 
talked. He smoked a pipe which was always needing 
tobacco, or going out, so that I have the figure of him 
before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair 
to rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He 
was often out of his chair to get a book from the shelves 
that lined the walls, either for a passage which he 
wished to read, or for some disputed point which he 
wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed 
putting me in the wrong ; if he could not, he sometimes 
whimsically persisted in his error, in defiance of all 
authority; but mostly he had such reverence for the 
truth that he would not question it even in jest. 

221 



LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt 
to find him reading the old Erench poets, or the plays 
of Calderon, or the Divina Cotnmedia, which he 
magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted 
Avith than I was because I knew some passages of it by 
heart. One day I came in quoting — 

" lo son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena, 
Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago." 

He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless 
music, and then uttered all his adoration and despair 
in one word. ''Damn!'' he said, and no more. I be- 
lieve he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his 
study w^alls with all their vistas into the great litera- 
tures cramped his soul liberated to a sense of ineffable 
beauty of the verse of the sommo poeta. But commonly 
lie preferred to have me sit down with him there among 
the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As 
I have suggested in my own case, it did not matter 
much whether you brought anything to the feast or not. 
If he liked you he liked being with you, not for what 
he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man 
whom I recall as the most silent man I ever met. I 
never heard him say anything, not even a dull thing, 
but Lowell delighted in him, and would have you believe 
that he was full of quaint humor. 



While Lowell lived there was a superstition which 
has perhaps survived him that he was an indolent man, 
v/asting himself in barren studies and minor efforts 
instead of devoting his great powers to some monu- 
mental work worthy of them. If the robust body of lit- 
erature, both poetry and prose, which lives after him 
does not yet correct this vain delusion, the time will 

222 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion 
cannot vex him now. I think it did vex him, then, and 
that he even shared it, and tried at times to meet such 
shadowy claim as it had. One of the things that people 
urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it 
is known how he attempted this in verse. It is less 
known that he attempted it in prose, and that he went 
so far as to write the first chapter of a novel. He read 
this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a feel- 
ing now that if he had finished the novel it would have 
been a failure. '^ But I shall never finish it,'' he sighed, 
as if he felt irremediable defects in it, and laid the 
manuscript away, to turn and light his pipe. It was a 
rather old-fashioned study of a w^himsical character, 
and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but 
I believe that it might have been different with a 
Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily 
in The Nooning and FUz Adam's Story. Still, his 
gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the 
universal Xew England tendency to allegory. He was 
wholly undramatic in the actuation of the characters 
which he imagined so dramatically. He liked to deal 
with his subject at first hand, to indulge through him- 
self all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic 
talent indulges through its personages. 

He enjoyed writing such a poem as ^^ The Cathedral,'' 
which is not of his best, but which is more immediately 
himself, in all his moods, than some better poems. He 
read it to me soon after it was written, and in the long 
walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way 
led us through the Port far towards East Cambridge, 
where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree of his 
acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his 
talk was still of the poem which he was greatly in con- 
ceit of. Later his satisfaction with it received a check 

223 



X 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

from the reserves of other friends concerning some 
whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop 
from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance 
nettled him; perhaps he agreed with them; but he 
would not change the lines, and they stand as he first 
' wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he first 
wrote them; he would often change them in revision, 
and then, in a second revision go back to the first version. 

He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from 
those he valued through his head or heart. He would 
try to hide his hurt, and he would not let you speak of 
it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you 
could see that he suffered. This notably happened in 
my remembrance from a review in a journal which he 
greatly esteemed ; and once when in a notice of my own 
I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he 
confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism 
hardily, but I knew tliat he winced under my recogni- 
tion of the didactic quality which he had not quite 
guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. 
He liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and 
I suppose he made himself believe that in trying his 
verse w^ith his friends he was testing it; but I do not 
believe that he was, and I do not think he ever corrected 
his judgment by theirs, however he suftered from it. 

In any matter that concerned literary morals he was 
more than eager to profit by another eye. One summer 
he sent me for the magazine a poem Avhich, when I 
read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like 
one we had lately printed by another contributor. There 
was nothing for it but to call his attention to the re- 
semblance, and I went over to Elmwood with the two 
poems. He w^as not at home, and I was obliged to leave 
the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the 
next morning's post brought me a delicious letter from 

224 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

him, all one cry of confession, the most complete, the 
most ample. He did not trouble himself to say that his 
poem was an imconscions rej^roduction of the other; 
that was for every reason imnecessary, hut he had at 
once rewritten it upon wholly different lines ; and I do 
not think any reader was reminded of Mrs. Akers's 
'' Among the Laurels " by Lowell's '' Foot-path." He 
was not only much more sensitive of others' rights than 
his own, but in spite of a certain severity in him, he 
was most tenderly regardful of their sensibilities when 
he had imagined them : he did not always imagine them. 



VI 

At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, 
when he unwillingly went abroad for a twelvemonth, 
Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses, and in 
still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, 
but he was most distinctly not a society man. He loved 
chiefly the companionship of books, and of men who 
loved books ; but of women generally he had an amus- 
ing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but 
he would rather not have had them about. This is 
oversaying it, of course, but the truth is in what I say. 
There was never a more devoted husband, and he was 
content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. 
He especially could not abide difference of opinion in 
women ; he valued their taste, their wit, their humor, 
but he would have none of their reason. I was by one 
day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, 
and after it had gone on for some time, and the impar- 
tial witness must have owned that she was getting the 
better of him he closed the controversy by giving her 
a great kiss, with the words, ^^ You are a very good 
girl, my deai-," and practically putting her out of the 
p 235 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

room. As to women of the flirtatious t}^e, he did not 
dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared 
them, and he said that with them there was but one 
way, and that was to run. 

I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more 
freely and fully himself than at any other. The pas- 
sions and impulses of his younger manhood had mel- 
lowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could 
blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his 
sobered ideals. His was alwa^'s a duteous life; but 
he had pretty well given up making man over in his 
own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no 
longer wish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fel- 
loAv-men as these sought him out, but he had ceased to 
seek them. He loved his friends and their love, but he 
had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It 
was that hour of civic suspense, in which public men 
seemed still actuated by unselfish aims, and one not 
essentially a politician might contentedly wait to see 
what would come of their doing their best. At any rate, 
without occasionally withholding open criticism or ac- 
claim Lowell waited among his books for the wounds 
of the war to heal themselves, and the nation to begin 
her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone, 
what might not one expect of American democracy ! 

His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In 
the old colonial mansion in wliich he was born, he dwelt 
in the embowering leafage, amid the quiet of lawns and 
garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those from 
the elms and the syringas where 

" The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang." 

From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsv 
tinkle of horse-car bells ; and sometimes a funeral trail- 
ed its black length past the corner of his groimds, and 

22S 



STUDIES or LOWELL 

lost itself from sight under the shadows of the willows 
that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In 
the winter the deep 'New England snows kept their 
purity in the stretch of meadow behind the house, which 
a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. 
All was of a modest dignity within and without the 
house, which Lowell loved but did not imagine of a 
manorial presence ; and he could not conceal his annoy- 
ance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in 
which the simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted 
as rich wood-carving. There was a graceful staircase, 
and a good wide hall, from which the dining-room and 
drawing-room opened by opposite doors ; behind the last, 
in the southwest corner of the house, was his study. 

There, literally, he lived during the six or seven 
years in which I knew him after my coming to Cam- 
bridge. Summer and winter he sat there among his 
books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, 
and by night yet more rarely. He went to the monthly 
mid-day dinner of the Saturday Club in Boston; he 
was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his 
whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed 
it ; he came always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow's, 
and he was familiarly in and out at Mr. E^orton's, of 
course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study, except for 
some rare and almost unwilling absences upon uni- 
versity lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell. 

Eor four years I did not take any summer outing 
from Cambridge myself, and my associations with Elm- 
wood and with Lowell are more of summer than of 
winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks 
through the snows, trudging along between the horse- 
car tracks which enclosed the only well-broken-out paths 
in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable 
expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were 

227 



LITEEARY FRIENDS AKB ACQUAINTANCE 

passing Longfellow's house, in mid-street, he came as 
near the declaration of his religious faith as he ever did 
in my presence. He was speaking of the Xew Testa- 
ment, and he said. The truth was in it; but they had 
covered it up with their hagiology. Though he had ^ 
been bred a Unitarian, and had more and more lib- 
erated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected 
an abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for 
the eternal punishment of the wicked. He was of a re- 
ligious nature, and he was very reverent of other peo- 
ple's religious feelings. He expressed a special tol- 
erance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because 
Mrs. Lowell was also a Swedenborgian ; but I do not 
think he was interested in it, and I suspect that all re- 
ligious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems 
are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an 
overruling providence, and especially in the God who 
declares vengeance His and will repay men for their 
evil deeds, and will right the weak against the strong. 
I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last 
years of his life, I asked him if he believed there was 
a moral government of the universe, he answered grave- 
ly and with a sort of pain. The scale was so vast, and 
we saw such a little part of it. 

As to the notion of a life after death, I never had 
any direct or indirect expression from him; but I in- 
cline to the opinion that his hold upon this weakened 
with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who 
have read much and thought much: they have appar- 
ently exhausted their potentialities of psychological 
life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet must be, but 
I do not think ]ie liked mystery. One morning he 
told me that when he came home the night before he 
had seen the Doppelgdnger of one of his household: 
though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see double. 

228 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

He then said lie used often to see people's Doppel- 
ganger; at another time, as to ghosts, he said, He was 
like Coleridge: he had seen too many of 'em. Lest 
anv weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the 
restricted oath which I have reported him using in 
a moment of transport it may be best to note here that 
I never heard him use any other imprecation, and this 
one seldom. 

Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; 
now and then, but only very rarely, the human nature 
of some story " unmeet for ladies " was too much for 
his sense of humor, and overcame him with amuse- 
ment which he was willing to impart, and did impart, 
but so that mainly the human nature of it reached you. 
In this he was like the other great Cambridge men, 
though he was opener than the others to contact with 
the commoner life. He keenly delighted in every na- 
tive and novel turn of phrase, and he would not under- 
value a vital word or a notion picked up out of the 
road even if it had some dirt sticking to it. 

He kept as close to the common life as a man of his 
patrician instincts and cloistered habits could. I 
could go to him with any new find about it and be sure 
of delighting him; after I began making my involun- 
tary and all but unconscious studies of Yankee charac- 
ter, especially in the country, he was always glad to talk 
them over with me. Still, when I had discovered a 
new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had cul- 
tivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with 
his pleasure; but this was after all less envy than a 
fine regret. 

At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing 
in Lowell's dress or bearing that would have kept the 
common life aloof from him, if that life were not al- 
ways too proud to make advances to any one. In 

229 



LITEEAEY FEIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

this retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough 
suit which he wore upon all out-door occasions, with 
heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw him with 
a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic 
stay in London; then he had become rather rigorously 
correct in his costume, and as conventional as he had 
formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he was apt 
to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left 
the sensation of their vigor for some time after they 
had clasped yours, were notably white. At the earlier 
period, he still wore his auburn hair somewhat long; 
it was darker than his beard, which was branching and 
full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his 
thick eyebrows ; neither hair nor beard was then 
touched with gray, as I now remember. ^\Tien he un- 
covered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself 
one of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were 
gay with humor, and alert with all intelligence. He 
had an enchanting smile, a laugh that was full of 
friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite 
music. Everything about him expressed his strenu- 
ous physical condition : he would not wear an overcoat 
in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he 
moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lift- 
ing his feet well from the ground. 



VII 

It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot 
impart, to linger in this effort to materialize his pres- 
ence from the fading memories of the past. I am 
afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he 
spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing 
for me to say that I think no man of my years and 
desert had ever so true and constant a friend. He 

230 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he 
was a poet through and through, and had been out of 
college before I was born. But he had already come 
to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to take 
counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies 
he can correct his perspective by the test of their fresh- 
er vision. Besides, Lowell was most simply and pa- 
thetically reluctant to part with youth, and was will- 
ing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not 
in any wise bear to be left out. When Mr. Bret Harte 
came to Cambridge, and the talk was all of the brill- 
iant character - poems with which he had then first 
dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most 
touching, however ungrounded sense of obsolescence. 
He could remember when the Bigloiu Papers were all 
the talk. I need not declare that there was nothing 
ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand 
down his laurels to a younger man; but he wished to 
do it himself. Through the modesty that is always 
a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously 
sensitive to the appearance of fading interest ; he could 
not take it otherwise than as a proof of his fading 
power. I had a curious hint of this when one year in 
making up the prospectus of the magazine for the next, 
I omitted his name because I had nothing special to 
promise from him, and because I was half ashamed to 
be always flourishing it in the eyes of the public. " I 
see that you have dropped me this year," he wrote, and 
I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he w^as 
glad to believe the truth when I told him. 

He did not care so much for popularity as for the 
praise of his friends. If he liked you he wished you 
not only to like what he wrote, but to say so. He was 
himself most cordial in his recognition of the things 
that pleased him. What happened to me from him, 

2n 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

happened to others, and I am only describing his com- 
mon habit when I say that nothing I did to his liking 
failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written ac- 
knowledgment. This continued to the latest years of 
his life when the effort even to give such pleasure must 
have cost him a physical pang. 

He was of a very catholic taste ; and he was apt to be 
carried away by a little touch of life or humor, and to 
overvalue the piece in which he found it; but mainly 
his judgments of letters and men were just. One of 
the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger 
in the Cambridge keeping, but Lowell was almost as 
averse as Longfellow from contempt. He could snub, 
and pitilessly, where he thought there was presump- 
tion and apparently sometimes merely because he was 
in the mood ; but I cannot remember ever to have 
heard him sneer. He Avas often wonderfully patient 
of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensi- 
ble to vulgarity. In spite of his reserve, he really 
wished people to like him ; he was keenly alive to 
neighborly good-will or ill-will ; and when there was 
a question of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part 
of his grounds, he was keenly hurt by hearing that 
some one who lived near him had said he hoped the 
city would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms, 
which his father had planted, and with which he was 
himself almost one blood ! 



VIII 

In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was 
constantly writing and pretty constantly printing, 
though still the superstition held that he w^as an idle 
man. To this time belongs the publication of some of 
his finest poems, if not their inception : there were cases 

232 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

in which their inception dated far back, even to ten or 
twenty years. He wrote his poems at a heat, and the 
manuscript which came to me for the magazine was 
iTsnally the iirst draft, very little corrected. But if the 
cold fit took him quickly it might hold him so fast that 
he would leave the poem in abeyance till he could slow- 
Iv live back to a likins; for it. 

The most of his best prose belongs to the time be- 
tween 1866 and 1874, and to this time we owe the 
several volumes of essays and criticisms called Among 
My Boohs and My Study Windows. He wished to 
name these more soberly, but at the urgence of his pub- 
lishers he gave them titles which they thought would be 
attractive to the public, though he felt that they took 
from the dignity of his work. He was not a good busi- 
ness man in a literary way, he submitted to others' judg- 
ment in all such matters. I doubt if he ever put a price 
upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was usually 
surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but 
sometimes if his need was for a larger sum, he thought 
it too little, without reference to former payments. 
This happened with a long poem in the Atlantic, which 
I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal hand- 
somely with him for. I did not know how many hun- 
dred they gave him, and when I met him I ventured to 
express the hope that the publishers had done their part. 
He held up four fingers, '' Quattro," he said in Italian, 
and then added with a disappointment which he tried 
to smile away, " I thought they might have made it 
cinque." 

Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but 
probably Lowell had in mind some end which cinque 
would have fitted better. It w^as pretty sure to be an 
unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift 
that he had wished to make. Long afterwards when I 

233 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

had been the means of getting him cinque for a poem 
one-tenth the length, he spoke of the pa^Tnent to me. 
'' It came very handily ; I had been wanting to give 

a watch.'' 

I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal 
with money 

" Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give." 

More probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by 
literature, which the literary man never quite rids him- 
self of, even when he is not a poet, and which made him 
wish to dedicate it to something finer than the every- 
day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no 
means more than he needed to live upon, and at that 
time he had pecuniary losses. He was T\Titing hard, 
and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, 
and he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he 
felt its absence for the year he went abroad. I do not 
know quite how to express my sense of something un- 
worldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation 
to money. 

He was not only generous of money, but he was gen- 
erous of himself, when he thought he could be of use, 
or merely of encouragement. He came all the way into 
Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian 
poets, which he could not have found either edifying or 
amusing, that he might testify his interest in me, and 
show other people that they were worth coming to. He 
would go carefully over a poem with me, word by word, 
and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be 
magnanimously tolerant of my sticking to phrasings 
that he disliked. In a certain line: 

" The silvern chords of the piano trembled/* 

he objected to silvern. Why not silver ? I alleged 

2U 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

leathern, golden, and like adjectives in defence of my 
word; but still he fonnd an affectation in it, and suf- 
fered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line 
of another piece — 

" And what she would, would rather that she would not " — 

he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress 
falling on the last word made it " public-school Eng- 
lish/' and he mocked it with the answer a maid had 
lately given him when he asked if the master of the 
house was at home. She said, " E'o, sir, he^is^ no^' 
when she ought to have said " ^"0, sir, he isnt:'^ He 
was appeased when I came back the next day with the 
stanza amended so that the verse could read — 

" And what she would, would rather she would not so "— 
but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. 
Yet, as I have noted in a former paper he professed 
not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any 
word that served his turn, without wincing; and he cer- 
tainly did use and defend words, as undisprivacied and 
disnatured, that made others wince. 

He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction 
that he would not have had me use slovenly vernacular 
even in the dialogue in my stories : my characters must 
not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and the 
like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him 
reading, I saw he had corrected my erring Western 
woulds and slioulds; as he grew old he was less and less 
able to restrain himself from setting people right to their 
faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he speci- 
fied my small acquaintance with a certain period of Eng- 
lish poetry, saying, " You're rather shady, there, old fel- 
low." But he would not have had me too learned, hold- 
ing that he had himself been hurt for literature by his 

scholarship. 

235 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

His patience in analyzing mj work with me miglit 
have heen the easy effort of his habit of teaching; and 
his willingness to give himself and his own was no 
doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man 
of letters who wished to work np a subject in the col- 
lege library, to stay a fortnight in his house, and to 
share his study, his beloved study, with him. This must 
truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits 
will understand. Happilv the man of letters was a 
good fellow, and knew how to prize the favor done him, 
but if he had been otherwise, it would have been the 
same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many 
things for the weaker brethren, which were amusing 
enough to one in the secret of his inward revolt. Yet 
in these things he was considerate also of the editor 
whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacri- 
fice, and he seldom offered me manuscripts for others. 
The only real burden of the kind that he put upon me 
was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled in New 
England during the early thirties, and had set down his 
impressions of men and manners there. It began 
charmingly, and went on very well under LowelPs dis- 
creet pruning, but after a while he seemed to fall in 
love with the character of the diarist so much that he 
could not bear to cut anything. 

IX 

He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined 
South, whose sins he felt that he had had his share in 
visiting upon her, and he was willing to do what he 
could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular 
Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon 
the dramatic shows of retribution which some of the 
Northern politicians were working, but with all his 
misgivings he continued to act with the Republican 

236 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

party until after the election of Hayes; he was away 
from the country during the Garfield campaign. He 
was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors chosen by 
the Eepublican majority in 1876, and in that most 
painful hour when there was question of the policy and 
justice of counting Hayes in for the presidency, it was 
suggested by some of Lowell's friends that he should 
use the original right of the electors under the consti- 
tution, and vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have 
chosen president over Hayes. After he had cast his 
vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter one 
day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps 
the faintest trace of indignation in his tone. He said 
that whatever the first intent of the constitution was, 
usage had made the presidential electors strictly the 
instruments of the party which chose them, and that for 
him to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen 
to vote for Hayes would have been an act of bad faith. 

He would have resumed for me all the old kind- 
ness of our relations before the recent year of his ab- 
sence, but this had inevitably worked a little estrange- 
ment. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that 
says much in such matters. He was not so perfectly 
at rest in the Cambridge environment; in certain inde- 
finable ways it did not so entirely suffice him, though 
he would have been then and always the last to allow 
this. I imagine his friends realized more than he, that 
certain delicate but vital filaments of attachment had 
frayed and parted in alien air, and left him heart-loose 
as he had not been before. 

I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the 
election of Hayes that he might be offered some place 
abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds of some of 
his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for 
myself alone when I used a family connection with the 

237 



LITEKARY FRIENDS A1\D ACQUAINTANCE 

President, very early in his term, to let him know that 
I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. I 
could assure him that I was writing wholly without 
Lowell's privity or authority, and I got back such a 
letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situa- 
tion. The President said that lie had already thought 
of offering LoA\'ell something, and he gave me the 
pleasure, a pk.^asure beyond any other I could imagine, 
of asking Lowell whether he woidd accept the mission 
to Austria. I lost no time carrying his letter to Elm- 
wood, wliere I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. 
He saw me at the threshold, and called to me through 
the open door to come in, and I handed him the letter, 
and sat down at table while he ran it through. When 
he had read it, he gave a quick '^ Ah !" and threw it 
over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read 
it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would not 
say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his 
acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely 
eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect N'ew 
England character in its tacit significance; after Low- 
ell had taken his coffee w^e turned into his study with- 
out further allusion to the matter. 

A day or two later he came to my house to say that 
he could not accept the Austrian mission, and to ask 
me to tell the President so for him, and make his 
acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. 
He remained talking a little while of other things, and 
w^hen he rose to go, he said with a sigh of vague reluc- 
tance, " I should like to see a play of Calderon,'' as if 
it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could 
still be fulfilled. '' Upon this hint I acted," and in due 
time it was found in Washington, that the gentleman 
who had been offered the Spanish mission would as lief 
go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid. 

23S 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 



When we met in London, some years later, he 
came almost every afternoon to my lodging, and 
the story of our old - time Cambridge walks began 
again in London phrases. There were not the vacant 
lots and outlying fields of his native place, but we made 
shift with the vast, simple parks, and we walked on the 
grass as we could not haA^e done in an American park, 
and were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said 
how much it was like those earlier tramps; and that 
pleased him, for he wished, whenever a thing delighted 
him, to find a Cambridge quality in it. 

But he was in love with everything English, and 
was determined I should be so too, beginning with the 
English weather, which in summer cannot be over- 
praised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he 
would not put it up in the light showers that caught us 
at times, saying that the English rain never wetted you. 
The thick short turf delighted him; he would scarcely 
allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted 
by a vile easterly storm in the spring of that }■ ear. The 
tender air, the delicate veils that the moisture in it 
cast about all objects at the least remove, the soft colors 
of the flowers, the dull blue of the low sky showing 
through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hover- 
ing pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he 
was anxious that I should not lose anything of their 
charm. 

Tie was anxious that I should not miss the value of 
anything in England, and while he volunteered that the 
aristocracy had the corruptions of aristocracies every- 
where, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it be- 
cause it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of 
irony in this demand, but it is certain that he was very 

239 



LITEKAKi" FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

happy in England. He had come of the age when a 
man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need 
make no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and ob- 
sequious service; society, perfectly ascertained within 
the larger society which we call civilization ; and in an 
alien environment, for which he was in nowise respon- 
sible, he could have these without a pang of the self- 
reproach which at home makes a man unhappy amidst 
his luxuries, when he considers their cost to others. 
He had a position Avhicli forbade thought of unfairness 
in the conditions ; he must not wake because of the 
slave, it was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time 
Lowell needed all the rest he could get, for he had lately 
passed through trials such as break the strength of men, 
and bow them with premature age. He was living alone 
in his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell 
was in the country, slowly recovering from the effects 
of the terrible typhus which she had barely survived in 
Madrid. ]Ie was yet so near the anguish of that ex- 
perience that he told me he had still in his nerves the 
expectation of a certain agonized cry from her which 
used to rend them. But he said he had adjusted him- 
self to this, and he went on to speak with a patience 
which was more affecting in him than in men of more 
phlegmatic temperament, of how we were able to adjust 
ourselves to all our trials and to the constant presence 
of pain. He said he was never free of a certain dis- 
tress, which Avas often a sharp pang, in one of his 
shoulders, but his physique had established such rela- 
tions with it, that though he was never unconscious of 
it he was able to endure it without a recognition of ii 
as suffering. 

He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age 
of sixty-three, I could not see that he was less alert and 
vigorous than he was when I first knew him in Cam- 

240 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

bridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and though 
his beard was well whitened and his anburn hair had 
gro^\Ti ashen through the red, his face had the fresh- 
ness and his eyes the clearness of a young man's. I 
suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking 
about his years ; or perhaps in contact with those great, 
insenescent Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. 
At any rate he did not once speak of age, as he used to 
do ten years earlier, and I, then half through my forties, 
was still '^ You young dog " to him. It was a bright 
and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between 
us, on which indeed there had never been a shadow, ex- 
cept such as distance throws. He wished apparently to 
do everything he could to assure us of his personal in- 
terest; and we were amused to find him nervously ap- 
prehensive of any purpose, such as was far from us, to 
profit by him officially. He betrayed a distinct relief 
when he found we were not going to come upon him 
even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which 
we were to see by means of an English acquaintance. 
He had not perhaps found some other fellow-citizens so 
considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place, 
like presentations to the queen, and complained of the 
cheap ambitions he had to gratify in that way. 

He was so eager to have me like England in every 
way, and seemed so fond of the English, that I thought 
it best to ask him whether he minded my quoting, in a 
paper about Lexington, which I was just then going 
to print in a London magazine, some humorous lines 
of his expressing the mounting satisfaction of an imag- 
inary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight terminate 
in Lord Percy's coming 

" To hammer stone for life in Concord jail." 

It had occurred to me that it might possibly em- 
Q 241 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

barrass him to have this patriotic picture presented to 
a public which could not take our Fourth of July 
pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did 
afterwards quite for literary reasons. He said. No, 
let it stand, and let them make the worst of it; and T 
fancy that much of his success with a people who are 
not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from 
the frankness with which he trampled on their preju- 
dice when he chose. He said he always told them, 
when there was question of such things, that the best 
society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massa- 
chusetts. He contended that the best English was 
spoken there ; and so it was, when he spoke it. 

We were in London out of the season, and he was 
sorry that he could not have me meet some titles who 
he declared had found pleasure in my books ; when we 
returned from Italy in the following June, he was 
prompt to do me this honor. I dare say he wished me 
to feel it to its last implication, and I did my best, but 
there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much as 
his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there 
was only a title or two left, and saying to her as he 
would have said to her at Elmwood, where she would 
have personally planned it, ^' Fanny, that was a fine 
dinner you gave us." Of course, this was in a tender 
burlesque; but it remains the supreme impression of 
what seemed to me a cloudlessly happy period for 
Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long suf- 
fering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing 
in his pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; 
successes so great that people spoke of him seriously, 
as " an addition to society " in London, where one man 
more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was a 
woman perfectly of the New England type and tradi- 
tion : almost repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially 

242 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

cold with new acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet 
and cordiaL She was of a dark beauty with a regular 
face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal 
manner towards her, and of an admiration which deli- 
cately travestied itself and which she knew how to re- 
ceive with smiling irony. After her death, which oc- 
curred while he was still in England, he never spoke of 
her to me, though before that he used to be always 
bringing her name in, with a young lover-like fondness. 



XI 

In the hurry of the London season I did not see so 
much of Lowell on our second sojourn as on our first, 
but once when we were alone in his study there was 
a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. 
He smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philoso- 
phized ; and but for the great London sea swirling out- 
side and bursting through our shelter, and dashing him 
with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a 
very fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me 
about his coachman whom he had got at on his human 
side with great liking and amusement, and there was 
a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman 
who had to keep coming in upon him with those notes 
which was like the echo of his young faith in the 
equality of men. But he always distinguished between 
the simple unconscious equality of the ordinary Ameri- 
can and its assumption by a foreigner. He said he did 
not mind such an American's coming into his house 
with his hat on ; but if a German or Englishman did it, 
he wanted to knock it off. Lie was apt to be rather 
punctilious in his shows of deference towards others, 
and at one time he practised removing his own hat when 
he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mysti- 

243 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

fied the Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept 
it up. 

With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, 
the fierce and the tender humanity of his storm and 
stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle in Lowell, which 
I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never 
knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, 
but he could not come to seventy years without having 
seen many high hopes fade, and known many inspired 
prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make 
the world over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it 
in much the old shape. As he said of the moral govern- 
ment of the universe, the scale is so vast, and a little 
difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely per- 
ceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale re- 
former. But with whatever sense of disappointment, 
of doubt as to his own deeds for truer freedom and for 
better conditions I believe his sympathy was still with 
those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I 
am sure that though he did not agree with me in some 
of my o-WTi later notions for the redemption of the race, 
he did not like me the less but rather the more because 
(to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and 
then the courage of my convictions, both literary and 
social. 

He was probably most at odds with me in regard to 
my theories of fiction, though he persisted in declaring 
his pleasure in my own fiction. He was in fact, by nat- 
ure and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could 
not or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He 
steadfastly refused even to read the Russian masters, 
to his immense loss, as I tried to persuade him, and 
even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might 
have had a sort of personal kindness from his love of 
Cervantes, he chose one for his praise the least worthy 

244 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

of it, and bore me down with his heavier metal in argu- 
ment when I opposed to Alarcon's factitiousness the de- 
lightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the 
I^orwegians, he put far from him; he would no more 
know them than the Russians; the French naturalists 
he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not 
try improving your elders when they have come to 
three score and ten years, and I would rather have had 
his affection unbroken by our difference of opinion 
than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined 
that this difference could work me harm, he was anxious 
to have me know that he meant me none ; and he was at 
the trouble to write me a letter when a Boston paper 
had perverted its report of what he said in a public 
lecture to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he 
had not me in mind. When once he had given his lik- 
ing, he could not bear that any shadow of change should 
seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful 
and endearing ideal of friendship; he desired to af- 
firm it and to reaffirm it as often as occasion offered, and 
if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It did not 
matter what you said or did that contraried him; if 
he thought he had essentially divined you, you were 
still the same : and on his part he was by no means ex- 
acting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to 
wish it. 

XII 

After he was replaced at London by a minister more 
immediately representative of the Democratic adminis- 
tration, he came home. He made a brave show of not 
caring to have remained away, but in truth he had be- 
come very fond of England, where he had made so many 
friends, and where the distinction he had, in that com- 
fortably padded environment, was so agreeable to him. 

245 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that 
the new President might keep him in London, but he 
never betrayed any ignoble disappointment, and he 
would not join in any blame of Ijini. At our first meet- 
ing after he came home he spoke of the movement which 
had made Mr. Cleveland president, and said he sup- 
posed that if he had been here, he should have been in 
it. All his friends were, he added, a little helplessly; 
but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of 
his friends who was not : in fact, as I have told, he never 
disliked a plump difference — unless he disliked the 
differer. 

For several years he went back to England every sum- 
mer, and it was not until ho took up his abode at Elm- 
wood again that he spent a whole year at home. One 
winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but 
mostly he lived with his daughter at Southborough. I 
have heard a story of his going to Elmwood soon after 
his return in 1885, and sitting down in his old study, 
where he declared with tears that the place was full of 
ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for 
family reasons that he should live there ; and about the 
same time it happened that I had taken a house for the 
summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and 
to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a 
sorrow for which there could be no help ; but it was not 
possible that the old intimate relations should be re- 
sumed. The affection was there, as much on his side 
as on mine, I believe ; but he was now an old man and I 
was an elderly man, and we could not, without insincer- 
ity, approach each other in the things that had drawn 
us together in earlier and happier years. His course 
was run ; my own, in which he had taken such a gener- 
ous pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. 
His life, so far as it remained to him, had renewed it- 

246 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

self in other air ; the later friendships beyond seas suf- 
ficed him, and were without the pang, without the ef- 
fort that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties 
here. 

He could never have been anything but American, if 
he had tried, and he certainly never tried; but he cer- 
tainly did not return to the outward simplicities of his 
life as I first knew it. There was no more round-hat- 
and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a 
high hat, and whatever else was rather like London 
than Cambridge ; I do not know but drab gaiters some- 
times added to the effect of a gentleman of the old 
school which he now produced upon the witness. Some 
fastidiousnesses showed themselves in him, which were 
not so surprising. He complained of the American 
lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would 
be kind to you but they would not be respectful, and 
he could not see the fun of this in the old way. Early 
in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by saying, 
" I like you because you don't put your hands on me,'' 
and I heard of his consenting to some sort of reception 
in those last years, " Yes, if they won't shake hands." 

Ever since his visit to Kome in 1875 he had let his 
heavy mustache grow long till it dropped below the cor- 
ners of his beard, which was now almost white ; his face 
had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I 
fancy he was then ailing with premonitions of the dis- 
order which a few years later proved mortal, but he 
still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and he walked 
the distance between his house and mine, though once 
when I missed his visit the family reported that after 
he came in he sat a long time with scarcely a word, as 
if too weary to talk. That winter, I went into Boston 
to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, 
when I could go out to Elmwood. At such times I 

247 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

found him sitting in the room which was formerly the 
drawing-room, bnt Avhich had been joined with his study 
by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of 
the okl colonial chimney. lie told me that when he 
was a new-born babe, the nurse had carried him round 
this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the same 
hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy- 
chair, with his writing-pad on his knees and his books 
on the table at his elbow, and was willing to be en- 
treated not to rise. I remendjer the sun used to come 
in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air 
in its warmth. 

He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with 
letters newly come from England, as I sometimes did, 
he glowed and s])arkled Avith fresh life. He wanted 
to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk 
about their writers, and to make me feel their worth 
and charm as he did. lie still dreamed of going back 
to England the next summer, but that was not to be. 
One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but 
with a certain excitement, and began to tell me about 
an odd experience he had had, not at all painful, but 
which had very much mystified him. He had since 
seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that 
there was nothing alarming in what had happened, and 
in recalling this assurance, he began to look at the hu- 
morous aspects of the case, and to make some jokes 
about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their 
maladies, and very fully, and I gave him such proof of 
my interest as even inviting him to talk of it would 
convey. In spite of the doctor's assurance, and his 
joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his 
heart there was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; 
but he had not for a long time shown himself so cheer- 
ful. 

248 



STUDIES OF LOWELL 

It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and 
relapsed, and recovered again ; but never for long. Late 
in the spring I came out, and he had me stay to dinner, 
which was somehow as it used to be at two o'clock ; and 
after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long- 
handled spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions 
which he found in his turf, but after a moment or two 
he threw it down, and put his hand upon his back with 
a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to 
take leave of him before going away for the summer, 
and then I found him sitting on the little porch in a 
western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott 
closed upon his finger. There were some other people, 
and our meeting was with the constraint of their pres- 
ence. It was natural in nothing so much as his saying 
very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies 
concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not 
approve of them, that there was nothing he now found 
so much pleasure in as Scott's novels. Another friend, 
equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted 
to gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told 
of having been a walk to Beaver Brook, and of having 
wished to jump from one stone to another in the stream, 
and of having had to give it up. He said, without com- 
pleting the sentence. If it had come to that with him! 
Then he fell silent again ; and with some vain talk of 
seeing him when I came back in the fall, I went away 
sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I shall 
not look upon his like. 

I am aware that I have here shown him from this 
point and from that in a series of sketches which per- 
haps collectively impart, but do not assemble his per- 
sonality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make 
one impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, 
which I should seek in vain to embody in a single pre- 

249 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

sentment. Wliat I have cloudily before me is the 
vision of a very lofty and simple sonl, perplexed, and 
as it were surprised and even dismayed at the complex- 
ity of the effects from motives so single in it, but es- 
caping always to a clear expression of what was noblest 
and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the 
divine exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in 
saints ; but I believe in great and good men, for I have 
known them, and among such men Lowell was of the 
richest nature I have known. His nature was not al- 
ways serene or pellucid ; it was sometimes roiled by the 
currents that counter and cross in all of us ; but it was 
without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never 
darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius 
was an instrument that responded in affluent harmony 
to the power that made him a humorist and that made 
him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite either 
alone. 



part Efgbtb 

CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

T)EI]^TG tlie wholly literary spirit I was when I went 
'^-^ to make my home in Cambridge, I do not see how 
I could well have been more content if I had found 
myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity 
before me. At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically im- 
mortal, and at that age, time had for me the effect of an 
eternity in which I had nothing to do but to read books 
and dream of writing them, in the overfloAV of endless 
hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical 
notices, and proofs of the Atlantic Moiithly. As for the 
social environment I should have been puzzled if given 
my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets 
and scholars more to my mind than those still in the 
flesh at Cambridge in the early afternoon of the nine- 
teenth century. They are now nearly all dead, and I 
can speak of them in the freedom which is death's 
doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still 
alive I could say little to their offence, unless their mod- 
esty was hurt with my praise. 



One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends 
was that exquisite intelligence, who, in a world where 
so many people are grotesquely miscalled, was most 
fiti V named ; for no man ever kept here more perfectly 

251 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven 
is of than Francis J. Child. lie was then in his prime, 
and I like to recall the outward image which expressed 
the inner man as happily as his name. He was of low 
stature and of an inclination which never became stout- 
ness ; but what jou most saw when jou saw him was his 
face of consummate refinement : very regular, with eyes 
always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight, 
short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with 
the sweetest smile that I ever beheld, and that was as 
wise and shrewd as it Avas sweet. In a time when ev- 
ery other man was more or less bearded he was clean 
shaven, and of a delightful freshness of coloring which 
his thick sunny hair, clustering upon his head in close 
rings, admirably set off. I believe he never became 
gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was 
broken then with years and pain, his face had still the 
brightness of his inextinguishable youth. 

It is well known how great was Professor Child's 
scholarship in the branches of his Harvard work; and 
how especially, how uniquely, effective it was in the 
study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave 
so many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature, 
and he wrought with passion as well as knowledge in 
the achievement of as monumental a task as any Ameri- 
can has performed. But he might have been indefinite- 
ly less than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet 
been precious to those who knew him for the gentleness 
and the goodness which in him were protected from 
misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as in- 
violable as that of Longfellow himself. 

We were still much less than a year from our life in 
Venice, when he came to see us in Cambridge, and in 
the Italian interest which then commended us to so 
many fine spirits among our neighbors we found our- 

253 



CAMBBIDGE NEIGHBORS 

selves at the beginning of a life-long friendship with 
him. I was known to him only by my letters from 
Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, 
and by a bit of devotional verse which he had asked 
to include in a collection he was making, but he imme- 
diately gave us the freedom of his heart, which after- 
wards was never withdrawn. In due time he imagined 
a home-school, to which our little one was asked, and 
she had her first lessons with his own daughter under 
his roof. These things drew us closer together, and he 
was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of 
trouble. At one such time when the shadow which 
must some time darken every door, hovered at ours, he 
had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, 
while it was still there, that it was not cruel and not 
evil. It passed, for that time, but the sense of his help 
remained; and in my own case I can testify of the 
potent tenderness which all who knew him must have 
known in him. But in bearing my witness I feel ac- 
cused, almost as if he were present, by his fastidious 
reluctance from any recognition of his helpfulness. 
When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit 
to itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as 
the architect of greatness, he was delightfully impa- 
tient of it, and he was most amusingly dramatic in re- 
producing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alum- 
ni who used to overwhelm him at Commencement sol- 
emnities with some such pompous acknowledgment as, 
" Professor Child, all that I have become, sir, I owe to 
your influence in my college career." He did, with de- 
licious mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs 
among the students, who used to walk the groves of Har- 
vard with bent head, and the left arm crossing the back, 
while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the high- 
buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes 

253 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

in college did not form the sunniest exposure for young 
folly and vanity. I know that he was intolerant of any 
manner of insincerity, and no flattery could take him 
off his guard. I have seen him meet this with a cut- 
ting phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at 
snubbing the patronage that offers itself at times to all 
men. But mostly he wished to do people pleasure, and 
he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for 
need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had 
alike the way to his heart. 

Children were always his friends, and they repaid 
with adoration the affection which he divided with them 
and with his flowers. I recall him in no moments so 
characteristic as those he spent in making the little ones 
laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive 
evening in his house, and those he gave to sharing with 
you his joy in his gardening. This, I believe, began 
with violets, and it went on to roses, which he grew in 
a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true 
lover with a genuine gift for them. Like Lowell, he 
spent his summers in Cambridge, and in the afternoon, 
you could And him digging or pruning among his roses 
with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could 
interrupt. He would lift himself from their ranks, 
wdiich he scarcely over-topped, as you came up the foot- 
way to his door, and peer purblindly across at you. If 
he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and 
swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trow^el 
or knife ; or if you got indoors unseen by him he would 
come in holding towards you some exquisite blossom 
that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a suc- 
cession of hospitable obeisances. 

He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard 
study, of as hard work, and as varied achievement as 
any I have kno\\Ti or read of ; and he played with gifts 

264 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

and acquirements such as in no great measure have 
made reputations. He had a rare and lovely humor 
which could amuse itself both in English and Italian 
with such an airy burletta as " II Pesceballo " (he wrote 
it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto 
English) ; he had a critical sense as sound as it was 
subtle in all literature; and whatever he wrote he im- 
bued with the charm of a style finely personal to him- 
self. His learning in the line of his Harvard teaching- 
included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his 
time, and his researches in ballad literature left no cor- 
ner of it untouched. I fancy this part of his study 
was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he loved simple 
and natural things, and the beauty which he found 
nearest life. At least he scorned the pedantic affecta- 
tions of literary superiority ; and he used to quote with 
joyous laughter the swelling exclamation of an Italian 
critic who proposed to leave the summits of polite 
learning for a moment, with the cry, " Scendiamo fra 
il popoloF' (Let us go down among the people.) 



II 

Of course it was only so hard worked a man who 
could take thought and trouble for another. He once 
took thought for me at a time when it was very im- 
portant to me, and when he took the trouble to secure 
for me an engagement to deliver that course of Lowell 
lectures in Boston, which I have said Lowell had the 
courage to go in town to hear. I do not remember 
whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he 
would have been if it were necessary; and I rather re- 
joice now in the belief that he did not seek quite that 
martyrdom. 

He had done more than enough for me, but he had 
255 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

done only what he was always willing to do for others. 
In the form of a favor to himself he brought into my 
life the great happiness of intimately knowing Iljalmar 
Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day 
among the shelves in the Harvard library, and found to 
be a poet and an intending novelist. I do not remem- 
l)er now just how this fact imparted itself to the pro- 
fessor, but literature is of easily cultivated confidence 
in youth, and possibly the revelation was spontaneous. 
At any rate, as a susceptible young editor, I was asked 
to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two 
o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the 
study, Boyesen took from the pocket nearest his heart 
a chapter of Gunnar. and read it to us. 

Perhai)s the good professor who brought us together 
had plotted to have both novel and novelist make tlieir 
impression at once upon the youthful sub-editor; but at 
any rate they did not fail of an effort. I believe it was 
that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and 
sing a siev together, for I associate with that far happy 
time the rich mellow tones of the poet's voice in the 
poet's verse. These were most characteristic of him, 
and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal 
wall beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet. 

Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, 
and the odor of the professor's roses stole in at the open 
windows, and became part of the gentle event. Boye- 
sen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I 
think we parted only to dream of the literature which 
we poured out upon each other in every waking mo- 
ment. I had just learned to know Bjornson's stories, 
and Boyesen told me of his poetr}^ and of his drama, 
which in even measure embodied the great NTorse liter- 
ary movement, and filled me with the wonder and de- 
light of that noble revolt against convention, that brave 

256 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart 
and the speech of the common people. Literature was 
Boyesen's religion more than the Swedenborgian phi- 
losophy in which we had both been spiritually nur- 
tured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we 
found ourselves on common ground in our worship of 
it. I was a decade his senior, but at thirty-five I was 
not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to re- 
joice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an in- 
candescent poetic mass. I have known no man who 
loved poetry more generously and passionately; and I 
think he was above all things a poet. His work took the 
shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave 
it all a touch of grace and beauty. Some years after 
this first meeting of ours I remember a pathetic moment 
with him, when I asked him why he had not written 
any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad 
astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not 
all poetry. In those earlier days I believe he really 
thought it was ! 

Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a 
life that stretched almost to half a century Boyesen 
learned more and more to see the poetry of the every- 
day world at least as the material of art. He did bat- 
tle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I 
suppose gave people a sufficiently false notion of him; 
and he showed his faith by works in fiction which better 
illustrated his motive. Gmmar stands at the beginning 
of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in 
matter and method stands The Mammon of Unright- 
eousness. The lovely idyl won him fame and friend- 
ship, and the great novel added neither to him, though 
he had put the experience and the observation of his 
ripened life into it. Whether it is too late or too early 
for it to win the place in literature which it merits I 



IITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

do not know ; but it always seemed to me the very spite 
of fate that it should have failed of popular effect. 
Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this 
without bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed 
the sj^irit of his youth as The Mammon of Unright- 
eousness embodied the thought of liis manhood. 



Ill 

It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar 
before the public as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and 
to second the author in many a struggle with the strange 
idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs went back 
and forth between us till the author had profited by ev- 
ery hint and suggestion of the editor. He was quick 
to profit by any hint, and he never made the same mis- 
take twice. He lived his English as fast as he learned 
it; the right word became part of him; and he put 
away the wrong word with instant and final rejection. 
He had not learned American English without learning 
newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase of it 
in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ulti- 
mate arbiters in such matters, its difference from true 
American and true English. It was wonderful how 
apt and how elect his diction was in those days; it 
deemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest 
phrase without his choosing. In his poetry he had ex- 
traordinary good fortune from the first; his mind had 
an apparent affinity with what was most native, most 
racy in our speech ; and I have just been looking over 
Gunnar and marvelling anew at the felicity and the 
beauty of his phrasing. 

I do not know whether those who read his books stop 
much to consider how rare his achievement was in the 
mere means of expression. Our speech is rather more 

258 




FRANCIS J, CHILD 



CAMBBIDGE NEIGHBORS 

hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five 
other writers born to different languages who have 
handled English with anything like his mastery. Two 
Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and Gallenga, the jour- 
nalist ; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand, 
and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of 
them equalled but none of them surpassed him. Yet 
he was a man grown when he began to speak and to 
write English, though I believe he studied it some- 
what in ^Norway before he came to America. What 
English he knew he learned the use of here, and in the 
measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of it 
as Americans. 

He had' least of his native grace, I think, in his crit- 
icism; and yet as a critic he had qualities of rare tem- 
perance, acuteness, and knowledge. He had very de- 
cided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he 
believed was good and all other kinds less good down 
to what was bad ; but he was not a bigot, and he made 
allowances for art-in-error. His hand fell heavy only 
upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith 
but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that 
decoration was more than structure, that make-believe 
was something you could live by as you live by truth. 
He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism. 
His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, 
and it rose rather to its full height in his appreciations 
of the great authors whom he loved, and whom he com- 
mented from the plentitude of his scholarship as well 
as from his delighted sense of their grandeur. Here 
he was almost as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine 
than in his more fortunate essays in fiction. 

After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another 
note so true. He did not strike it again till he wrote 
The Mammon of Unrighteousness, and after that he 

259 



LITERx\RY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

was sometimes of a wandering and -uncertain touch. 
There are certain stories of his which I cannot read 
without a painful sense of their inequality not only 
to his talent, but to his knowledge of human nature, and 
of American character. lie understood our character 
quite as well as he understood our language, but at times 
he seemed not to do so. I think these were the times 
when he was overworked, and ought to have been resting 
instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses command 
of alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boy- 
esen's achievements we must never forget that he was 
born strange to our language and to our life. In Gun- 
nar he handled the one with grace and charm; in his 
great novel he handled both with masterly strength. I 
call The Mammon of Unrighteousness a great novel, 
and I am quite willing to say that I know few novels 
by born Americans that surpass it in dealing with 
American types and conditions. It has the vast 
horizon of the masterpieces of fictions; its mean- 
ings are not for its characters alone, but for every read- 
er of it ; when you close the book the story is not at an 
end. 

I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that 
my praise cannot please him any more. But it was a 
book worthy the powers which could have given us yet 
greater things if they had not been spent on lesser 
things. Boyesen could ^' toil terribly," but for his fame 
he did not always toil wisely, though he gave himself as 
utterly in his unwise work as in his best ; it was always 
the best he could do. Several years after our first meet- 
ing in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city 
where money counts for more and goes for less than in 
any other city of the world, and he could not resist the 
temptation to write more and more when he should 
have written less and less. He never wrote anything 

2C0 



CAMBKIDGE NEIGFBOES 

that was not worth reading, but he wrote too much for 
one who was giving himself with all his conscience to his 
academic work in the university honored by his gifts 
and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in 
the vacations which should have been days and weeks 
and months of leisure. The wonder is that even such 
a stock of health as his could stand the strain so long, 
but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the 
direction of the work which he loved so well. When a 
man adds to his achievements every year, we are apt 
to forget the things he has already done; and I think 
it well to remind the reader that Eoyesen, who died at 
forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and 
lectures unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criti- 
cism on German and Scandinavian literature, a volume 
of literary and social essays, a popular history of Nor- 
way, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction, and 
four books for boys. 

Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible. He was not 
content to be merely a scholar, merely an author ; he 
wished to be an active citizen, to take his part in honest 
politics, and to live for his day in things that most men 
of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to 
know American life better and to appreciate it more 
justly, both in its good and its evil; and as a matter 
of fact he knew us very well. His acquaintance with 
us had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our 
literary men, and touched many aspects of our civiliza- 
tion which remain unknown to most Americans. When 
he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a tear^h- 
er in Ohio ; he had been a professor in Cornell Univer- 
sity and a literary free lance in I^ew York; and every- 
where his eyes and ears had kept themselves open. As 
a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate or the 
more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his 

261 



LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

knowledirc was continually extending itself among all 
ages and classes of Americans. 

He was through and throngh a Norseman, but he was 
none the less a very American. Between Norsk and 
Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more intimate than 
the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of 
life; both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me 
that among the Norwegians men never kissed each other, 
as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the Italians 
do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground. 
Wlien he explained the democratic character of society 
in Norway, I could well understand how he should find 
us a little behind his own countrymen in the practice, if 
not the theory of equality, though they lived under a 
king and we under a president. But he was proud of 
his American citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at 
its best, for humanity. He divined that the true ex- 
pression of America was not civic, not social, but domes- 
tic almost, and that the people in tlie simplest homes, or 
those who remained in the tradition of a simple home 
life, were the true Americans as yet, whatever the fut- 
ure Americans might be. 

When I first knew him he was chafing with the im- 
patience of youth and ambition at what he thought his 
exile in the West. There was, to be sure, a difference 
between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, 
and he realized the difference in the extreme and per- 
haps beyond it. I tried to make him believe that if a 
man had one or two friends any^vhere who loved letters 
and sjTnpathized with him in his literary attempts, it 
was incentive enough ; but of course he wished to be in 
the centres of literature, as we all do ; and he never was 
content until he had set his face and his foot Eastward. 
It was a great step for him from the Swedenborgian 
school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca ; and 
' 262 




mOFESSOR CHILD S HOUSE 



CAMBEIDGE NEIGIIBOKS 

I remember his exultation in making it. But he could 
not rest there, and in a few years he resigned his profes- 
sorship, and came to ]^ew York, where he entered high- 
licartcdly upon the struggle with fortune which ended 
in his appointment in Columbia. 

]N'ew York is a mart and not a capital, in literature 
as well as in other things, and doubtless he increasingly 
felt this. I know that there came a time when he no 
longer thought the West must be exile for a literary 
man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a 
lecturer impressed him with the genuineness of the in- 
terest felt there in culture of all kinds. He spoke of 
this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as 
what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and 
I think that in reconciling himself to our popular crude- 
ness for the sake of our popular earnestness, he com- 
pleted his naturalization, in the only sense in which 
our citizenship is worth having. 

I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, 
or ceased to love it proudly and tenderly. He kept for 
Norway the fondness which the man sitting at his own 
hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of 
good family; his people w^ere people of substance and 
condition, and he could have had an easier life there 
than here. He could have won even wider fame, and 
doubtless if he had remained in j^orway, he would have 
been one of that group of great I^orwegians who have \ 
given their little land renown surpassed by that of no 
other in the modern republic of letters. The name of 
Boyesen would have been set with the names of Bjorn- 
son, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once 
he had seen America (at the wish of his father, who had 
visited the United States before him), he thought only 
of becoming an ^American. When I first knew him he 
was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was 

263 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

of fjords and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and 
nixies, of housemen and gaardsmen ; but he was glad 
to be here, and I think he never regretted that he had 
cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deep- 
est interest in his country and countrymen. He stood 
the friend of every Norwegian who came to him in want 
or trouble, and they came to him freely and frequently. 
He sympathized strongly with Norway in her quarrel 
with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as au- 
tonomy; and though ho did not go all lengths with the 
national party, he was decided in his feeling that Swe- 
den was unjust to her sister kingdom, and strenuous 
for the principles of the Norwegian leaders. 

But, as I have said, poetry was what his ardent spirit 
mainly meditated in tliat hour when I first knew him 
in Cambridge, before we had either of us grown old 
and sad, if not wise. lie overflowed with it, and he 
talked as little as he dreamed of anything else in the 
vast half-summer we spent together. lie was constant- 
ly at my house, where in an absence of my family I was 
living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, 
or sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a 
cloud of fancies, not unmixed with the mosquitoes of 
Cambridge: if I could have back the fancies, I would be 
willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked 
the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit 
fjords; his bro^\Ti silken hair was thick on the crown 
which it later abandoned to a scholarly baldness; his 
soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the youthful 
beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a 
stalwart breadth of frame, and his voice was of a pe- 
culiar and endearing quality, indescribably mellow and 
tender when he read his verse. 

I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him 
here, for he was only a sojourner in Cambridge, but 

2G4 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

the memory of that early intimacy is too much for my 
sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our in- 
timacy was renewed afterwards, when I too came to 
live in ^ew York, where as long as he was in this dolce 
lome, he hardly let a week go hy without passing a long- 
evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and 
life, but more of life than of literature, and we seldom 
spoke of those old times. I still found him true to the 
ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us as 
the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in what- 
ever we did. This we felt, as we had felt it long before, 
to be the sole source of beauty and of art, and we warm- 
ed ourselves at each other's hearts in our devotion to it, 
amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did 
not characterize it by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, in- 
deed, out-realisted me, in the polemics of our aesthetics, 
and sometimes when an unbeliever was by, I willingly 
left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not with- 
out some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in dis- 
ciplining the heretic. But now that ardent and active 
soul is Elsewhere, and I have ceased even to expect the 
ring, which, making itself heard at the late hour of his 
coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That 
mechanical expectation of those who will come no more 
is something terrible, but when even that ceases, we 
know the irreparability of our loss, and begin to realize 
how much of ourselves they have taken with them. 



IV 

It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which 
was the fourth or fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I 
made the acquaintance of a man, very much my senior, 
who remains one of the vividest personalities in my 
recollection. I speak of him in this order perhaps be- 

265 



LITERAEY FRIENDS AXD ACQUAINTANCE 

cause of an obscure association with Boyesen through 
their religious faith, which was also mine. But Henry 
James was incommcnsurably more Swedenborgian than 
either of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg 
with an entirety and intensity far beyond the mere as- 
sent of other men. lie did not do this in any stupidly 
exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive 
way, with a constant reference of these vain mundane 
shadows to the spiritual realities from which project 
them. Ilis piety, which sometimes expressed itself in 
terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too 
large for any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn 
from the books which record it, how absolutely indi- 
vidual his interpretations of Swedenborg were. Clari- 
fications they cannot be called, and in that other world 
whose substantial verity was the inspiration of his life 
here, the two sages may by this time have met and 
agreed to differ as to some points in the doctrine of the 
Seer. In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle 
giving way ; and I do not say he would be wrong to in- 
sist, but I think he might now be willing to allow Jthat 
the exegetic pages which sentence by sentence were so 
brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective opaci- 
ty which the most resolute vision could not penetrate. 
He put into this dark wisdom the most brilliant in- 
telligence ever brought to the service of his mystical 
faith ; he lighted it up with flashes of the keenest wit 
and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that 
it is truly wonderful to me how it should remain so 
unintelligible. But I have only tried to read certain 
of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted in the 
effort I might have found them all as clear at last as 
the one which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly 
most encouragingly suggestive: I mean the one called 
Society the Redeemed Form of Man, 

266 




W. D. HO WELLS S HOME 
Concord Avenue. Cambridge 



CAMBKIDGE NEIGHBORS 

He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only 
liberated him from the bonds of the Calvinistic theology 
in which his youth was trammelled, but it had secured 
him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing 
Unitarian doctrine which supremely w^orshipped Con- 
duct ; and it had colored his vocabulary to such strange 
effects that he spoke of moral men with abhorrence, as 
more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose 
sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of 
others, he called the Devil ; but in spite of his perception 
of such diabolism, he was rather fond of yielding to it, 
for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell 
under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too 
plainly shared his joy in his characterization of certain 
fellow-men ; perhaps a group of Bostonians from whom 
he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of 
themselves he presented in the image of ^^ simmering in 
their own fat and putting a nice brown on each other." 

Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man. He 
thought that very likely his life had those lapses in it 
which some of his followers deny ; and he regarded him, 
on the 8esthetical side as essentially commonplace, and 
as probably chosen for his prophetic function just be- 
cause of his imaginative nullity : his tremendous revela- 
tions could be the more distinctly and unmistakably in- 
scribed upon an intelligence of that sort, which alone 
could render again a strictly literal report of them. 

As to some other sorts of believers who thought they 
had a special apprehension of the truth, he had no 
mercy upon them if they betrayed, however innocently, 
any self-complacency in their possession. I went one 
evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, 
who had the misfortune to say that his people believed 
themselves to be living the angelic life. James fast- 
ened upon him with the suggestion that according to 

2r;f 



LITERARY FRIENDS AXD ACQUAINTANCE 

Swedenborg the most celestial angels Avere unconscious 
of their oa\ti perfection, and that if the Shakers felt 
they were of angelic condition they were probably the 
sport of the hells. I was very glad to get my poor old 
friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware 
of being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake 
himself. 

With spiritualists eTamcs had little or no sympathy; 
he was not so impatient of them as the Swedenborgians 
commonly are, and he probably acknowledged a measure 
of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he seemed 
rather incurious concerning them, and he must have re- 
garded them as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; 
as emanations from the hells. Tlis powerful and pene- 
trating intellect interested itself with all social and civil 
facts through his religion. lie was essentially religious, 
but he was very conscio\isly a citizen, A\ath most decided 
opinions upon political questions. My own darkness 
as to anything like social reform was then so dense that 
I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such matters, 
but I have the impression that it was far more radical 
than I could understand. He was of a very merciful 
mind regarding things often held in pitiless condemna- 
tion, but of charity, as it is commonly understood, he 
had misgivings. He would never have turned away 
from him that asketh ; but he spoke with regret of some 
of his benefactions in the past, large gifts of money to 
individuals, which he now thought had done more harm 
than good. 

I never knew him to judge men by the society scale. 
He was most human in his relations with others, and 
was in correspondence with all sorts of people seeking 
light and help; he answered their letters and tried to 
instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or 
^he could reach him on his or her own level, though he 

26S 



CAMBEIDGE NEIGHBOKS 

had his humorous perception of their foibles and disa- 
bilities; and he had that keen sense of the grotesque 
which often goes with the kindliest nature. He told of 
his dining^ early in life, next a fellow-nian from Cape 
Cod at the Astor House, where such a man could seldom 
have found himself. When thev were served with meat 
this neighbor asked if he Avould mind his putting his 
fat on James's plate : he disliked fat. James said that 
he considered the request, and seeing no good reason 
against it, consented. 

He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied 
insincerity or pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the 
hurt he gave. He was indeed tremulously sensitive, 
not only for himself but for others, and would offer 
atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he 
supposed himself to have given. 

At all times he thought originally in words of delight- 
ful originality, which painted a fact with the greatest 
vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching 
of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them, 
he said, " He spasmed to the fellow across the room, 
and introduced him." His written style had traits of 
the same bold adventurousness, but it was his speech 
which was most captivating. As I write of him I see 
him before me : his white bearded face, with a kindly in- 
tensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth 
humorously shaping the mustache, the eyes vague be- 
hind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick 
on which he rested his weight to ease it from the arti- 
ficial limb he wore. 



The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were 
in those days to be seen in the shady walks of Cambridge 
to which for me they lent a Weimarish quality, in the 

269 



LlTEKAKr FRIEKDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I felt a 
quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss 
and Latin, and not Teutonic, but he was of the Conti- 
nental European civilization, and was widely different 
from the other Cambridge men in everything but love 
of the place. " He is always an Europder/' said Low- 
ell one day, in distinguishing concerning him ; and for 
any one who had tasted the flavor of the life beyond the 
ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he was 
extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien 
born had a truer or tenderer sense of New England 
character. I have an idea that no one else of his day 
could have got so much money for science out of the 
General Court of Massachusetts ; and I have heard him 
s])eak with the wisest and warmest appreciation of the 
liard material from which he was able to extract this 
treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations 
for his Museum and his otlier scientific objects w^ere not 
usually lawyers or profcf^sional men, with the perspec- 
tives of a liberal education, but were hard-fisted farm- 
ers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it were 
their ow^n, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. 
They understood that he did not want it for himself, and 
had no interested aim in getting it ; they knew that, as 
he once said, he had no time to make money, and wished 
to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and 
with this understanding they were ready to help *him 
generously. He compared their liberality with that of 
kings and princes, when these patronized science, with 
a recognition of the superior plebeian generosity. It 
was on the veranda of his sunnner house at Nahant, 
while he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I 
heard him refer also to the offer which Napoleon III. 
had made him, inviting him upon certain splendid con- 
ditions to come to Paris ^f ter he had established himself 

270 



CAMBBIDGE NEIGHBORS 

in Cambridge. He said that he had not come to Amer- 
ica without going over every snch possibility in his own 
mind, and deciding beforehand against it. He w^as a 
republican, by nationality and by' preference, and was 
entirely satisfied with his position and environment in 
'New England. 

Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was 
more friends with Longfellow than with any one else, 
I believe, and Longfellow told me how, after the doctors 
had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his 
failing health he had broken down in his friend's study, 
and wept like an Europiier, and lamented, " I shall 
never finish my work!" Some papers which he had 
begun to write for the magazine, in contravention of the 
Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known 
Agassiz did not accept, remained part of the work which 
he never finished. After his death, I wished Professor 
Jefi'reys Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic, but he 
excused himself on account of his many labors, and then 
he voluntarily spoke of Agassiz's methods, which he 
agreed with rather than his theories, being himself thor- 
oughly Darwinian. I think he said Agassiz was the first 
to imagine establishing a fact not from a single example, 
but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a 
question of something about robins for instance, he 
would have a hundred robins examined before he would 
receive an appearance as a fact. 

Of course no preconception or prepossession of his 
own was suffered to bar his way to the final truth he 
was seeking, and he joyously renounced even a con- 
clusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether 
Mrs. Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a 
delightful story which she told me about him. He came 
to her beaming one day, and demanded, '' You know 
I have always held such and such an opinion about a 

271 



LITERARY FRIENDS xVND ACQUAINTANCE 

certain group of fossil fishes ?" " Yes, yes !'' ^^ Well, 

I have just been reading 's new book, and he has 

shown me that there isn't the least truth in my theory" ; 
and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in re- 
linquishing his error. 

I could touch science at Cambridge only on its liter- 
ary and social side, of course, and my meetings with 
Agassiz were not niauy. I recall a dinner at his house 
to Mr. Bret llarte, Avhen the poet came on from Cali- 
fornia, and Agassiz approached him over the coifee 
through their mutual scientific interest in the last 
meeting of the geological ^^ Society upon the Stanislow.'^ 
He quoted to the author some passages from the poem 
recording the final proceedings of this body, which had 
particularly pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as 
much amused at finding himself thus in touch with the 
savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that de- 
licious poem. 

Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James 
almost at the other end, with an interval between them 
which but poorly typified their difference of tempera- 
ment. The one was all philosophical and the other all 
scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz 
may be said to have led that movement towards the new 
position of science in matters of mystery which is now 
characteristic of it. He was ancestrally of the Swiss 
'' Brahminical caste," as so many of his friends in Cam- 
bridge were of the Brahminical caste of jNew England ; 
and perhaps it was the line of ancestral pasleurs which 
at last drew him back, or on, to the affirmation of an un- 
formulated faith of his own. At any rate, before most 
other savants would say that thej^ had souls of their own 
he became, by opening a summer school of science with 
prayer, nearly as consolatory to the unscientific who 
wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John Fiske him- 



CA]\£BKIDGE NEIGHBORS 

self, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwin- 
ism, had arrived at nearly the same point by such a very 
different road. 

VI 

Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cam- 
bridge home, and when we went to live in Berkeley 
Street, he followed with his family and placed himself 
across the way in a house which I already knew as the 
home of Eichard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years 
Before the Mast. Like nearly all the other Cambridge 
men of my acquaintance Dana was very much my senior, 
and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as 
cordially as if it were performance, with no suggestion 
of the condescension which was said to be his attitude 
towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw anything 
of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend 
of those patrician qualities and democratic principles 
which made Lowell anomalous even to himself. He is 
part of the antislavery history of his time, and he gave 
to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a 
politician ; his gifts and learning in the law were freely 
at their service. He never lost his interest in those 
white slaves, whose brutal bondage he remembered as 
bound with them in his Tivo Years Before the Mast, 
and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might 
count upon his friendship as surely as the black slaves 
of the South. He was able to temper his indignation 
for their oppression with a humorous perception of what 
was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish 
I could recall all that he said once about sea-etiquette on 
merchant vessels, where the chief mate might no more 
speak to the captain at table without being addressed 
by him than a subject might put a question to his sover- 
eign. He was amusing in his stories of the Pacific 
s 273 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

trade in which he said it was very noble to deal in furs 
from the N'orthwest, and very ignoble to deal in hides 
along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every 
ship's master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying 
trade, and in one of Dana's instances, two vessels en- 
counter in mid-ocean, and exchange the usual parley 
as to their respective ports of departure and destination. 
The final demand comes through the trumpet, '' What 
cargo?" and the captain so challenged yields to 
temptation and roars back ''Furs!" A moment of 
hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, 
" Here and there a horn?'' 

There were other distinctions, of which seafaring 
men of other days were keenly sensible, and Dana dram- 
atized the meeting of a great, swelling East Indiaman, 
with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She 
shouts back through her captain's trum.pet that she is 
from Calcutta, and laden with silks, spices, and other 
orient treasures, and in her turn she requires like an- 
swer from the sail which has presumed to enter into par- 
ley with her. '^ What cargo ?" The trader confesses 
to a mixed cargo for Boston, and to the final question, 
her master replies in meek apology, '' Only from Liver- 
pool, sir!" and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as 
possible. 

Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling 
was in Cambridge. He was a lawyer in active practice, 
and he went every day to Boston. One was apt to meet 
him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and 
forth between the two cities, and which were often so 
full of one's acquaintance that they had all the social 
elements of an afternoon tea. They were abusively 
overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily 
see a prime literary celebrity swaying from a strap, or 
hanging imeasily by the hand-rail to the lower steps of 




HOME OF KICHAKD HENRY DANA, JR. 

Berkeley Street, Cambridge 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

the back platform. I do not mean that I ever happened 
to see the autlior of Two Years Before the Mast in either 
fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for 
the illustration of my point. His book probably car- 
ried the American name farther and wider than any 
American books except those of Irving and Cooper at a 
day when our writers w^ere very little known, and 
our literature was the only infant industry not fos- 
tered against foreign ravage, but expressly left to 
harden and strengthen itself as it best might in a 
heartless neglect even at home. The book was delight- 
ful, and I remember it from a reading of thirty years 
ago, as of the stuff that classics are made of. I venture 
no conjecture as to its present popularity, but of all 
books relating to the sea I think it is the best. The 
author when I knew him w^as still Kichard Henry Dana, 
Jr., his father, the aged poet, who first established the 
name in the public recognition, being alive, though past 
literary activity. It was distinctively a literary race, 
and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its 
continued literary vitality in the romance of Espiritu 
Santo by the youngest daughter of the Dana I knew. 



VII 

There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, 
education, and character than a man who lived 
at the same time in Cambridge, and who produced 
a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy 
to be named with Two Years Before the Mast. Ralph 
Keeler wrote the Vagabond Adventures which he had 
lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the pres- 
ence of our great literary men not only because I had an 
affection for him, tenderer than I then knew, but be- 
cause I believe his book is worthier of more remem- 

275 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

branoe than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it only 
the other day, and I found it delightful, and much bet- 
ter than I imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the 
several papers which it is made up of. I am not sure 
but it belongs to the great literature in that fidelity to 
life which I have spoken of, and Avhich the author 
brought himself to practise with such difficulty, and 
under so much stress from his editor. He really want- 
ed to fake it at times, but he was docile at last and did it 
so honestly tliat it tells the history of his strange career 
in much better terms than it can be given again. He 
had been, as he claimed, '' a cruel uncle's ward '' in 
liis early orphanhood, and while yet almost a child he 
had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's desire 
of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. 
But it was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack 
on a lake steamboat, and meet with many squalid ad- 
ventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a Spanish 
picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and 
even a danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fru- 
ition of his hopes was so little what he imagined that 
he was very willing to leave the Floating Palace on the 
Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, 
and enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Gir- 
ardeau in Missouri. They were very good to him, and in 
their charge he picked up a good deal more Latin, if not 
less Greek than another strolling player who also took 
to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and 
then to California, whence he wrote me that he was com- 
ing on to Boston with the manuscript of a novel which 
he wished me to read for the magazine. I reported 
against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's 
faith in it, imtil he had printed it at his own cost, and 
known it fail instantly and decisively. He had come to 
Cambridge to see it through the press, and he remained 

27C 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

there four or five years, with certain brief absences. 
Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seven- 
ties, he accepted the invitation of a ISTew York paper to 
go to Cuba as its correspondent. 

^' Don't go, Keeler," I entreated him, when he came 
to tell me of his intention. " They'll garrote you down 
there.'- 

'^ Well," he said, with the air of being pleasantly in- 
terested by the coincidence, as he stood on my study 
hearth with his feet wide apart in a fashion he had, 
and gayly flirted his hand in the air, " that's what Al- 
drich says, and he's agreed to write my biography, on 
condition that I make a last dying speech when they 
bring me out on the plaza to do it, ^ If I had taken the 
advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of Marjorie 
Daw and Other People, I should not now be in this 
place.' " 

He went, and he did not come back. He was not in- 
deed garroted as his friends had promised, but he was 
probably assassinated on the steamer by which he sailed 
from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was 
never heard of again. 

I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little 
to show it as men commonly do. If I am to meet some- 
where else the friends who are no longer here, I should 
like to meet Kalph Keeler, and I would take some 
chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by 
no means kept itself unspotted, but which in all its con- 
sciousness of error, cheerfully trusted that "the Al- 
mighty was not going to scoop any of us." The faith 
worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply 
or humbly affirmed, and no man I think could have been 
more helplessly sincere. He had nothing of that false 
self-respect which forbids a man to own himself wrong 
promptly and utterly when need is ; and in fact he own- 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

ed to some things in his checkered past which would 
hardly allow him any sort of self-respect. He had 
always an essential gayety not to be damped by any dis- 
cipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheer- 
ful com})liance. " ^^hy do you use bias for opinion?" 
I demanded, in going over a^proof with him. ^' Oh, be- 
cause I'm such an ass — such a bi-ass." 

He had a pliilosophy which he liked to impress with a 
vivid touch on his listener's shoulder: "Tut your finger 
on the present moment and enjoy it. It's the only one 
you've got, or ever will have." This light and joyous 
creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, 
and I need not say that I never met him in any of the 
great Cambridge houses. I am not sure that he was 
a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was 
framed rather for men's liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I 
had our subtleties as to whether his mind about women 
was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his manner. 
Iveeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious 
mind towards the society which'ignored him, and of too 
sweet a cheerfulness to be greatly vexed by it. He 
lived on in the house of a suave old actor, who oddly 
made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a 
harmless bohemianism in his daily walk, which included 
lunches 'at Boston restaurants as often as he could get 
you to let him give them you, if you were of his ac- 
quaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out 
of the post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated 
Cambridge was coming for its letters, and wave a glad 
hand in air, and shout a blithe salutation to the friend 
he had marked for his companion in a morning stroll. 
The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton 
(I do not know why, except perhaps that it was out of 
the beat of the better element) and the talk was mainly 
of literature, in which he was doing less than he meant 

278 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel was 
not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be le- 
gitimately worked by like advertising, though he truly 
loved and honored it. 

I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and 
Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which 
showed their shadows in his smiling face. He was of 
a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of 
almost womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and 
his restless eyes were blue ; he wore his yellow beard in 
whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps 
did not get to droop so much as he wished. 



VIII 

Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cam- 
bridge when I first came there an Indianian, more ac- 
cepted by literary society, who was of real quality as a 
poet. Forceythe Willson, w^hose poem of ^' The Old 
Sergeant " Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the 
closing year of the civil war, was of a Western altitude 
of figure, and of an extraordinary beauty of face in an 
oriental sort. He had large, dark eyes with clouded 
whites ; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian 
blackness. He was excessively nervous, to such an ex- 
treme that when I first met him at Longfellow's, he 
could not hold himself still in his chair. I think this 
was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for 
afterwards when I went to find him in his own house 
he was much more at ease. 

He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall 
after opening his door to me himself, and w^e sat down 
there and talked, I remember, of supernatural things. 
He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had 
several stories to tell of his own experience in such mat- 

279 



LITERARY FRIEXDS AND AC QUAINT A:^rCE 

ters. But none was so good as one which I had at sec- 
ond hand from Lowell, who thought it almost the best 
ghost story he had ever heard. The spirit of Willson's 
father appeared to him, and stood before him. Will- 
son was accustomed to apparitions, and so he said sim- 
ply, '' Won't you sit down, father V The phantom put 
out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people 
do in taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through 
the trame-work. '' Ah !" he said, *' I forgot that I was 
not substance." 

I do not know whether ^^ The Old Sergeant '' is ever 
read now ; it has probably passed with other great mem- 
ories of the great war ; and I am afraid none of Will- 
son's other verse is remembered. But he was then a dis- 
tinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count 
of our poets. I did not see him again. Shortly after- 
wards I heard that he had left Cambridge with signs of 
'consumption, which must have run a rapid course, for 
a very little later came the news of his death. 

IX 

The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I 
knew, would perhaps have contended that if he had stay- 
ed with us Willson might have lived ; for John Holmes 
affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which as- 
cribed almost an asceptic character to its air, and when 
he once listened to my own complaints of an obstinate 
cold, he cheered himself, if not me, with the declaration, 
" Well, one thing, ^[r. Howells, Cambridge never let a 
man keep a cold yet !" 

If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with 
a cold than elsewhere without one I should have believed 
him ; as it was, Cambridge bore him out in his assertion, 
though she took her own time to do it. 

280 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

Lowell had talked to me of him before I met 
him, celebrating his peculiar humor with that affec- 
tion which was not always so discriminating, and 
Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I 
knew. I knew him first in the charming old 
Colonial house in which his famous brother and he 
were born. It was demolished long before I left Cam- 
bridge, but in memory it still stands on the ground since 
occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and shows 
for me tlirough that bulk a phantom frame of Continen- 
tal buff in the shadow of elms that are shadows them- 
selves. The genius loci w^as limping about the pleasant 
mansion with tKe rheumatism which then expressed 
itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now 
insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length 
presence to my mind: a short stout figure, helped out 
with a cane, and a grizzled head with features formed 
to win the heart rather than the eye of the beholder. 
In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such win- 
ning humor and geniality that it took the liking more 
than any beauty could have done, and the sweetest, 
shy laugh in the world went with this cast. 

I long wished to get him to write something for the 
magazine, and at last I prevailed with him to review a 
history of Cambridge which had come out. He did it 
charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of 
Cambridge than anything else. He held his native town 
in an idolatry which was not blind, but which was none 
the less devoted because he was aware of her droll points 
and her weak points. He always celebrated these as so 
many virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her 
that first commended me to him. I was not her son, but 
he felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault, 
and he seemed more and more to forgive it. After we 
had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met 

281 



LITERx\IlY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

oftener than before, thoiigK I do not now remember 
that I ever persuaded him to write again for me. Once 
he gave me something, and then took it back, with a 
self-distrust of it which I could not overcome. 

When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to 
live with an old domestic in a small house on the street 
amusingly called Appian Way. He had certain rooms 
of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that 
he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he 
continued till he died. In the process of time he come 
so far to trust his experience of me, that he formed the 
habit of giving me an annual supper. Some days before 
this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers 
delicate and tentative approaches, nearly always of the 
same tenor, he would say that he should like to ask my 
family to an oyster supper witli him. " But you know,'' 
he would explain, " I haven't a house of my own to ask 
you to, and I should like to give you the supper here." 
When I had agreed to this suggestion with due gravity, 
he would in(piiro our engagements, and then say, as if 
a great load were off his mind, " Well, then, I will send 
up a few oysters to-morrow," or whatever day we had 
fixed on ; and after a little more talk to take the strange- 
ness out of the affair, would go his way. On the day 
appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons 
of oysters, which he reported ^Iv. Holmes had asked 
him to bring, and in the evening the giver of the feast 
would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth bag, sagged by 
some bottles of wine. There was always a bottle of red 
wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had 
taken the precaution to send some crackers beforehand, 
so that the supper should be as entirely of his own giving 
as possible. He was forced to let us do the cooking and 
to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified him- 
self for putting us to these charges and for the use of 

282 




JOHN G. PALFREY 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

our linen and silver, by the vast superfluity of his oys- 
ters, with which we remained inundated for days. He 
did not care to eat many himself, but seemed content to 
fancy doing us a pleasure ; and I have known few great- 
er ones in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly play- 
ed the host to us at our own table. 

It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Can- 
tabrigian that Ave should ever have been willing to leave 
Cambridge, and in fact I do not well understand it my- 
self. But if he resented it, he never showed his resent- 
ment. As often as I happened to meet him after our 
defection he used me with unabated kindness, and spar- 
kled into some gayety too ethereal for remembrance. 
The last time I met him was at Lowell's funeral, Avhen I 
drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the 
revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our 
laugh, as people do in the presence of death, at some- 
thing droll we remembered of the friend we mourned. 



X 

My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sac- 
ramento Street, was the Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the 
historian of 'Ne\Y England, whose chimney-tops amid 
the pine-tops I could see from my study window when 
the leaves were off the little grove of oaks between us. 
He was one of the first of my acquaintances, not suffer- 
ing the great disparity of our ages to count against me, 
but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my youth 
in the friendly intercourse which he invited. He was a 
most gentle and kindly old man, with still an interest 
in liberal things which lasted till the infirmities of age 
secluded him from the world and all its interests. As 
is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost 
of the New England antislavery men, and he had 

283 



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

fought the good fight with a heavy heart for a brother 
long settled in Louisiana Avho sided with the South, and 
who after the civil war found himself disfranchised. In 
this temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor 
Palfrey upon the doctor's insistence, though at first he 
would have nothing to do with him, and refused even 
to answer his letters. " Of course," the doctor said, 
" I was not going to stand tliat from my mother's son, 
and I simply kept on writing.'' So he prevailed, but 
the fiery old gentleman from Louisiana was reconciled 
to nothing in the North but his brother, and when he 
came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his 
cause of quarrel with us. ^' I can't vote," he declared, 
^' but my coachman can, and I don't know how I'm to 
get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me all 
over with the iodine he's using for my rheumatic 
side." 

Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Erahmini- 
cal caste and was long an eminent Unitarian minister, 
but at the time I began to know him he had long quitted 
the pulpit. He was so far of civic or public character 
as to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neigh- 
bors, but this officiality was probably so little in keeping 
with his nature that it was like a return to his truer self 
when he ceased to hold the place, and gave his time alto- 
gether to his history. It is a work which will hardly 
be superseded in the interest of those who value 
thorough research and temperate expression. It is very 
just, and without endeavor for picture or drama it is to 
me very attractive, ]^^uch that has to be recorded of 
Xew England lacks charm, but he gave form and dig- 
nity and presence to the memories of the past, and the 
finer moments of that great stor}', he gave with the sim- 
plicity that was their best setting. It seems to me such 
an apology (in the old sense) as [New England might 

2vS4 



CAMBmlXiE NEIGHBORS 

have written for herself, and in fact Doctor Palfrey 
was a personification of ISTew England in one of the best 
and truest kinds. He was refined in the essential gen- 
tleness of his heart without being refined away ; he kept 
the faith of her Puritan tradition though he no longer 
kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of the Puritan 
severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial 
as it was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their 
time, and rather better and not worse than other people 
of the same time. He was himself a most tolerant man, 
and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped 
well short of condoning error, which he condemned when 
he preferred to leave it to its own punishment. Person- 
ally he was without any flavor of harshness; his mind 
was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the gen- 
tlest I have ever known. 

Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with 
unexpected bursts of lyrical gayety, was Christopher 
Pease Cranch, the poet, whom I had known in 'New 
York long before he came to live in Cambridge. He 
could not only play and sing most amusing songs, but he 
wrote very good poems and painted pictures perhaps not 
so good. I always liked his Venetian pictures, for 
their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed 
as well as liked many of his poems. During the time 
that I knew him more than his due share of troubles 
and sorrows accumulated themselves on his fine head, 
which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the 
beautiful, white-bearded face. But he had the artist 
soul and the poet heart, and no doubt he could take 
refuge in these from the cares that shadowed his visage. 
My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed 
itself upon the very terms of its beginning in 'New 
York. We met at Longfellow's table, where he lifted 
up his voice in the Yankee folk-song, " On Springfield 

2S5 



IITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

Mountain there did dwell/' which he gave with a per- 
fectly killing mock-gravity. 



XI 

At Cambridge tlio best society was better, it seems 
to me, than even that of the neighboring capital. Tt 
would be rather hard to prove this, and I must ask the 
reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it. 
The great interests in that pleasant world, which I 
think does not present itself to my memory in a false 
iridiscence, were the intellectual interests, and all other 
interests were lost in these to such as did not seek them 
too insistently. 

People held themselves high; they held themselves 
personally aloof from people not duly assayed ; their 
civilization was still Puritan though their belief had 
long ceased to be so. They had weights and measures 
stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than 
ours, by which they rated the merit of all comers, and 
rejected such as did not })ear the test. These standards 
were their own, and they were satisfied with them ; most 
Ajnericans have no standards of their own, but these 
are not satisfied even with other people's, and so our 
society is in a state of tolerant and tremulous misgiving. 

Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it 
counts in New England everywhere, but family alone 
did not mean position, and the want of family did not 
mean the want of it. Money still less than family com- 
manded ; one could be openly poor in Cambridge with- 
out open shame, or shame at all, for no one was very rich 
there, and no one was proud of his riches. 

I do not wonder that Tourguenieff thought the condi- 
tions ideal, as Boyesen portrayed them to him; and I 
look back at my own life there with wonder at my good 

2sa. 




QUINCY STREET CAMBRIDGE 

The Agassiz house in background, obscured by trees. Former location of James house in 

foreground 



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 

fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible this 
had its alloys. I was young and unknown and was mak- 
ing my way, and I had to suffer some of the penalties 
of these disadvantages; but I do not believe that any- 
where else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vain- 
ly imagined that the material struggle forms a high in- 
centive and inspiration, would my penalties have been 
so light. On the other hand, the good that was done me 
I could never repay if I lived all over again for others 
the life that I have so long lived for myself. At times, 
when I had experienced from those elect spirits with 
whom I was associated, some act of friendship, as signal 
as it was delicate, I used to ask myself, how I could ever 
do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any one 
again ; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it. 
The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficient- 
ly cool to be bracing, but what was of good import in me 
flourished in it. The life of the place had its lateral 
limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect ex- 
cellent things that lay beyond it ; but upward it opened 
inimitably. I speak of it frankly because that life 
as I witnessed it is now almost wholly of the past. Cam- 
bridge is still the home of much that is good and fine in 
our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel 
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. 
William James, Mr. Horace E. Scudder, not to name 
any others, but the first had not yet come back to live in 
his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and 
the rest had not yet their actual prominence. One, in- 
deed among so many absent, is still present there, whom 
from time to time I have hitherto named without offer- 
ing him the recognition which I should have known an 
infringement of his preferences. But the literary 
Cambridge of thirty years ago could not be clearly 
imagined or justly estimated without taking into ac- 

2S7 



LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE 

count the creative sympathy of a man whose contribu- 
tions to our literature only partially represent what he 
has constantly done for the humanities. I am sure 
that after the easy heroes of the day are long forgot, 
and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle 
to their essential insignificance before these of the gen- 
tle life, we shall all see in Charles Eliot Norton the 
eminent scholar who left the quiet of his books to be- 
come our chief citizen at the moment when he warned 
his countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing 



THE END 



3lv7T-9 



